| schema:articleBody
| - Guinea's ruling party on Thursday urged President Alpha Conde to seek a third term in elections due this year, a scenario that has sparked clashes in the West African state. Under Guinea's constitution, presidents may only serve two terms. Conde, 82, was elected president in 2010 and again in 2015. But this year he pushed through a revamped constitution that opponents say was crafted to effectively reset the term counter, enabling him to run again. His Rally of the Guinean People (RPG) party announced that it wanted Conde to run again at a convention in the capital Conakry. Party members are issuing a "plea to President Alpha Conde to accept the will of the people to be the RPG's sole candidate," MP Diakagbe Kaba told around 350 delegates. The RPG wants "a national and total mobilisation, including all the structures of the party, for a victory in the first round of the presidential election," said Zeinab Camara, rapporteur of the commission in charge of the electoral strategy. The president, who was absent from the convention, has yet to formally respond to the request. He has previously said that "the party will decide" who goes forward to the poll. Guinea's electoral commission has proposed the presidential election be held on October 18, but Conde has yet to sign off on a date. It was not clear whether Conde would speak to delegates before the end of the two-day convention on Thursday afternoon. The announcement is likely to incense Guinea's embattled opposition, which has staged mass rallies since October against the possibility of Conde running for a third term. Security forces in the former French colony repeatedly cracked down on the protests, in which several dozen civilians were killed. Opposition figures also attempted to organise a boycott of the referendum in March, but the vote went ahead despite protests. According to the official results, the constitution was approved by 91.59 percent of those voting, with a turnout of 61 percent. Conde is a former opposition figure himself who was jailed under Guinea's previous iron-fisted regimes. Hopes of a new political dawn flowered when Conde became Guinea's first democratically elected president in 2010, but critics say he has become increasingly authoritarian. The country, which is rich in minerals, suffers from entrenched poverty and a history of instability. But Prime Minister Kassory Fofana opened the convention on Wednesday declaring that Conde was the right choice as "the world faces the COVID-19 pandemic and where violence is widespread". "The difficult times are menacing, but I am sure we will emerge victorious under the leadership of President Alpha Conde," he said. Malick Sankon, a member of the RPG's national political bureau, said Wednesday that he expected Conde to accept the party's request. "We have no alternative, nobody has emerged, so we are continuing to tell him to do the work and we will see later," Sankon told AFP. The head of state had already received support earlier this week from a coalition of parties allied to the RPG, the Democratic Convention for Change in Continuity (CODECC). Its spokesman, Hydraulics Minister Papa Koly Kourouma, had praised his achievements, especially in terms of "economic take-off". bm/siu/erc/pma
|
![[RDF Data]](/fct/images/sw-rdf-blue.png)
![[cxml]](/fct/images/cxml_doc.png)
![[csv]](/fct/images/csv_doc.png)
![[text]](/fct/images/ntriples_doc.png)
![[turtle]](/fct/images/n3turtle_doc.png)
![[ld+json]](/fct/images/jsonld_doc.png)
![[rdf+json]](/fct/images/json_doc.png)
![[rdf+xml]](/fct/images/xml_doc.png)
![[atom+xml]](/fct/images/atom_doc.png)
![[html]](/fct/images/html_doc.png)