By Sakeus Iikela, Windhoek NAMIBIA
The ruling South West Africa
People's Organisation (SWAPO) Party
has lost its overwhelming parliamentary dominance after gaining 63 seats in the
National Assembly election – just short of a two-thirds majority that would
have enabled the party to push through constitutional changes despite
opposition from other parties.
President Hage Geingob won
re-election with 56,3% of the votes cast in the presidential election – a fall
of more than a third from his 87% share of the vote in 2014. Independent
presidential candidate Panduleni Itula received 29,4% of the votes in the
presidential election, ending in second place after Geingob.
The ruling party enjoyed an
overwhelming majority in the National Assembly since 1994 and reached a high
point of winning 77 out of 96 voting seats in the 2014 election.
A total of 820 227 votes were
cast in this year's National Assembly election, according to results announced
by the Electoral Commission of Namibia on Saturday evening.
Swapo received 536 861 of the
votes, which is equivalent to 65,5% and earned the ruling party 63 of the
voting seats in the National Assembly.
Coming in second is the
Popular Democratic Movement (PDM), which gained 136 576 votes or 16,6% of the
total number of votes cast.
The quota to qualify for a
seat in the National Assembly was set at 8 544 votes.
Eleven out of the fifteen
political parties that contested the National Assembly election won seats in
parliament.
The Popular Democratic
Movement (PDM) is the biggest winner with 16 seats, followed by new entrants
the Landless People's Movement (LPM) with four seats.
The PDM won five seats in the
National Assembly in the 2014 election.
Other political parties that
gained seats in the National Assembly for the first time include the Christian
Democratic Voice Party and the Namibia Economic Freedom Fighters (NEFF), which
won one and two seats respectively.
The United Democratic Front
(UDF), National Unity Democratic Organisation (Nudo), All People's Party and
Republican Party won two seats each, while the Rally for Democracy and Progress
(RDP) and Swanu scraped back into the National Assembly with one seat each.
The four parties that did not
qualify for any seats in parliament are the former official opposition the
Congress of Democrats, the Workers Revolutionary Party, the National Patriotic
Front and the National Democratic Party.
In a short statement delivered
after his re-election, Geingob downplayed the importance of a two-thirds
majority in parliament, saying it could not prevent the National Assembly from
passing important laws.
Geingob said the two-thirds
majority can only be useful when deciding on crucial things such as amending
the constitution.
PDM leader McHenry Venaani in
an interview with The Namibian said it was good news that the
two-thirds majority was broken.
“It will sanitise the politics
of the country. It will sanitize the debate in the house, legislation and we
will start listening to each other, because we are sitting with a government
that doesn't listen to anyone,” Venaani said.
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