Mozambique Is Reporting Big Victory for President - NYTimes.com

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By BARRY BEARAK

JOHANNESBURG — A partial count in Mozambique’s elections on Friday shows President Armando E. Guebuza of the Frelimo Party far ahead of his two opponents and likely to finish with around 75 percent of the votes.

If the pattern holds up, and political analysts predict it will, it will be the most decisive victory in the nation’s four presidential elections.

Frelimo, with much superior financing and a tightly run organization, is also expected to win overwhelmingly in the race for seats in Parliament and provincial legislatures.

Frelimo insiders had predicted a landslide. “We are really just competing with ourselves; our aim is to win by a margin greater than in the past,” a party spokesman, Edson Macuácua, said recently.

Mr. Guebuza, 66, is one of the nation’s wealthiest businessmen. Among his main campaign slogans was “With Guebuza we will win the battle against poverty.” The fight has quite a way to go. The country, with 21 million people, has per capita income of only $454, according to the World Bank.

Mozambique was once a Portuguese colony, and after independence in 1975 it became the battleground for one of Africa’s most devastating civil wars. Peace finally came in 1992, and the two warring armies — Frelimo and Renamo — were transformed into competing political parties.

Frelimo, a one-time Marxist organization that now eagerly shakes the marketplace’s guiding hand, has managed to stay on top. Renamo has fallen ever further behind, and Wednesday’s election could prove a backbreaker.

The official results may not be announced by the nation’s election commission until Nov. 12. But for now, Afonso Dhlakama, Renamo’s longtime leader, finds himself in a tight race for second place with Daviz Simango, a relative newcomer who started his party, the Mozambique Democratic Movement, only last March.

Experts say the Renamo candidate is likely to pull ahead for the runner-up spot when more returns come in from the northern parts of the nation. Yet Mr. Dhlakama, who has headed Renamo for 25 years, is unlikely to make another try. In 1999, he narrowly lost the presidential election. In 2004, he was defeated by 32 percentage points. This time, the margin will be much larger.

Under Frelimo, Mozambique has managed to attract foreign investors eager to exploit the nation’s mineral wealth. It also has become a darling of foreign donors, whose annual contributions come to an estimated $2 billion.

Many of those donors, however, have expressed their disapproval with the way the election has been run.

The election commission, widely believed to be dominated by Frelimo, refused to allow the Mozambique Democratic Movement to compete for parliamentary seats in 9 of the 13 voting constituencies. It cited procedural grounds.

Mr. Simango, the mayor of the country’s second-largest city, Beira, may not even manage 10 percent of the presidential vote. “But even if he gets 9 percent, it’s a good start for someone who first appeared on the national stage less than a year ago,” said Miguel de Brito, the country director for EISA, a group that works for democratic reforms in Africa. “It may be less of a start than Simango wanted, but it shows he has some base.”

On Friday, in a meeting with reporters, election observers from the European Union praised the voting as “well-managed” and “calm.” But they too criticized the election commission for excluding so many candidates on technicalities, calling it a “restriction of voter choice at the local level.”