Ivory Coast: supporters of re-elected president Alassane Ouattara celebrate

Supporters of Ivory Coast’s President Alassane Ouattara celebrated on Monday after he was reelected for a fourth term, according to provisional results.

Ouattara, 83, who first came to power in the West African nation in 2011, won 89.7% of the vote, Electoral Commission head Ibrahime Kuibiert Coulibaly said Monday.

“You said it, you did it. You said you were going to go out and vote for Alassane Ouattara, and you went out and you voted for him”, said Adama Bictogo, the leader of Ouattara’s Rally of Houphouëtists for Democracy and Peace party.

Jean-Louis Billon, a former commerce minister from one of Ivory Coast’s richest families, came in a distant second with 3% of the vote. Simone Gbagbo, a former first lady, came in third with 2.4%, under the provision results.

Final results are expected by early November, though they could be announced sooner. Some 8.5 million people were registered to vote. Voter turnout was around 50%. Billon had already congratulated Ouattara on Sunday evening, based on early results. Ouattara first came to power after winning a disputed election in late 2010 against his predecessor, Laurent Gbagbo.

Deadly unrest surrounding that election — the country's first in a decade — left at least 3,000 people dead before Ouattara, backed by UN and French forces, assumed power. Since then, his supporters have credited him with restoring the conflict-ravaged economy in the world's largest cocoa producer, while critics have accused him of tightening his grip on power.

Ouattara was challenged by what experts considered a weakened opposition after the exclusion of major candidates, Tidjane Thiam and Laurent Gbagbo, from the polls.

With a two-term limit, Ouattara oversaw a referendum that changed the Ivorian constitution in 2016, during his second term. In 2020, he said that the constitution reset his time in office to zero, a move that his opponents rejected at the time. They boycotted that year's election, and he won with more than 90% of the votes.