The choice could stir up new tensions in Guinea. The party of Guinean President Alpha Condé asked him, Thursday, August 6, to be his presidential candidate in October and therefore to run for a third term, despite the wave of protests that this prospect has raised for months in the country.

"It emerges from the speeches a plea in the direction of President Alpha Condé, so that he accepts the will of the people to be the sole candidate of the RPG in the presidential election", declared before the delegates of the People's Rally of Guinea (RPG) the deputy responsible for the synthesis of the work of the convention, Diakagbé Kaba.

Some 350 RPG executives gathered since Wednesday in the grounds of the People's Palace have multiplied the praise for the head of state, 82, absent from the convention. Alpha Condé, elected in 2010 and re-elected in 2015, has so far not formally applied for a third term, repeating for months: "it is my party that will decide".

Challenge against a third term

It was not clear whether the Head of State would come to speak to his activists when the convention resumed work in the early afternoon. The Guinean Constitution limits the number of terms to two, but the adoption at the beginning of the year of a new fundamental law in a referendum boycotted by the opposition allows the president to reset the counters to zero, according to his supporters.

Alpha Condé has repeatedly criticized the limitation to two of the number of mandates authorized, calling it unfair. Launched in mid-October by the National Front for the Defense of the Constitution (FNDC), made up of the main opposition parties and civil society organizations, the mobilization against a possible third term of the president, several times repressed, made dozens of protesters dead.

The head of state, a former historic opponent, in 2010 became the first democratically elected president after decades of authoritarian regimes in this former French colony in West Africa.

With AFP

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