Venancio Mondlane's attempt to have candidates stand for parliament and provincial assemblies has failed, although he will still stand as an independent candidate for President. CAD (the Democratic Alliance Coalition) is a new coalition of small parties formed to back Mondlane because his support among urban youth means his lists would have elected members to provincial and national parliaments.
But the CNE rejected the lists because CAD “does not meet the requirements” to be a coalition because of the details of its statutes. The CNE says CAD's statutes establish the CAD as an entity separate from its component political parties, rather than a coalition of them. Its statutes state that “it is a collective person independent of any other political organisation, and thus constituting an entity separate from the parties that form it”, the CNE says.
The CNE says it unanimously approved the decision very early this morning (18 July) after a very long meeting.
The decision rests on ignoring an arcane procedural point which until now has been used to reject opposition protests. The basis of the electoral law is that an improper action must be challenged at the earliest possible point. CNE member Salomão Moyana opposed rejection of the CAD citing the ruling of the Constitutional Council of 2019 which rejected the request of Renamo to annul the voter registration in Gaza province, because there were hundreds of thousands of ghost voters on the register. In its ruling, the Constitutional Council had said that this should have been challenged during the registration process, and if actions are not challenged at the earliest point, then they are accepted.
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Moyana argued that in the same way the CNE had accepted CAD as a coalition, and it was too late to go back on that. But another CNE member argued that this principle did not apply to the statutory irregularities of the CAD. According to the CNE decision, “invalidity can be invoked at any moment, in the terms of article 286 of the Civil Code”.
The CNE cited two other irregularities. It says the coalition was formed on 27 April this year, but it only informed the Ministry of Justice, and Constitutional and Religious Matters, on 18 June, a month and a half later, when the law stipulates a deadline of 15 days counted from the date of the constitution of the coalition pact. The other argument for rejecting the CAD’s lists is that when the CAD’s registration documents of 28 June 2018 were compared with the coalition pact of 27 April this year, the CNE found that the latter does not mention the parties CDU and PEMO, part of the original coalition. It said “there were no minutes proving any modification or alteration” of coalition members, which violates the law on political parties.
But some people will see this as the three parties already in parliament, who automatically have seats on the CNE, using that power to maintain the current cosy arrangement of Frelimo in power and Renamo and MDM as official opposition, receiving state funds. Many young voters who would have backed Mondlane and CAD would have elected at least some members to national and provincial parliaments who would have challenged the status quo. Again, Mozambican youth lose their voice.
