By Stephen Brown
In a landmark election, millions of voters braved Taliban threats and scattered rocket attacks on Thursday to turn up at polling stations across Afghanistan and cast their ballots for a new president and for provincial officials.
This momentous event is only the second democratic election in Afghanistan’s troubled history, but it differs greatly from the previous one in October 2004. Seventy percent of eligible voters participated in the 2004 national election, Afghanistan’s first, but it was really more a referendum on the country’s first post-Taliban president, Hamid Karzai. He was the only real candidate.
The 2009 election, by contrast, is a much more competitive affair. Karzai, the frontrunner as he seeks another five-year term, is facing real opposition in the form of his former foreign minister, Abdullah Abdullah, and also from former World Bank official and finance minister, Ashraf Ghani. Observers speculated before the election that it was doubtful whether Karzai would receive the 51 percent of the vote needed to prevent a second round of voting, in which Abdullah is expected to be the opponent. Read more ...
In a landmark election, millions of voters braved Taliban threats and scattered rocket attacks on Thursday to turn up at polling stations across Afghanistan and cast their ballots for a new president and for provincial officials.
This momentous event is only the second democratic election in Afghanistan’s troubled history, but it differs greatly from the previous one in October 2004. Seventy percent of eligible voters participated in the 2004 national election, Afghanistan’s first, but it was really more a referendum on the country’s first post-Taliban president, Hamid Karzai. He was the only real candidate.
The 2009 election, by contrast, is a much more competitive affair. Karzai, the frontrunner as he seeks another five-year term, is facing real opposition in the form of his former foreign minister, Abdullah Abdullah, and also from former World Bank official and finance minister, Ashraf Ghani. Observers speculated before the election that it was doubtful whether Karzai would receive the 51 percent of the vote needed to prevent a second round of voting, in which Abdullah is expected to be the opponent. Read more ...
Source: FPM
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