Towards Democratic Governance and an Effective Fight Against Poverty in Burundi after the Elections

Between May and September 2010, Burundi has been through several stages of an electoral process. The first vote was at communal level on 24 May. The presidential elections took place on 28 June and the legislative elections followed on 23 July. On 27 August Pierre Nkurunziza, re-elected president, was sworn in for his second term. Elections for chefs de collines and chefs de quartiers (heads of villages and neighbourhoods) completed the series on 7 September.

The electoral process did not go as expected: reacting to the results of the communal elections the main opposition parties decided not to put up candidates for the remaining polls, denouncing what they described as « massive fraud » used against them in the communal elections. The various independent observation missions, among them the joint mission of the Civil Society Coalition for Electoral Monitoring (COSOME) and the European Network for Central Africa (EurAc), did not come to this conclusion. While they accepted that there had been some irregularities during the poll, the independent observers found no proof of such "massive fraud" on a scale which would confirm the opposition's analysis.