The Malian military should have returned power to civilians by mid-2022.

The transitional authorities dominated by the military unveiled, Thursday April 15, the electoral calendar which will allow to leave the period opened by the coup of August 18 last.

The first rounds of the presidential and legislative elections will take place on February 27, 2022, and possible second rounds respectively on March 13 and 20, said the Minister of Territorial Administration, Lieutenant-Colonel at a press conference. Abdoulaye Maïga.

This double ballot is "within the strict framework of respect for the duration of the transition, that is to say 18 months", he stressed.

The presidential and legislative elections will be preceded on October 31 by a referendum which should allow a revision of the Constitution, long promised but never materialized.

"This date takes into account the time necessary (from April) to conduct consultations, prepare the draft Constitution, adopt it by the National Transitional Council (CNT, which acts as Parliament), and finally its adoption by referendum ", explained Abdoulaye Maïga.

Regional and local elections are also scheduled for December 26, the minister also said.

An electoral calendar awaited for months

The announcement of an electoral calendar was awaited with growing impatience by the international community and had been the subject of numerous debates for months in Bamako, in particular on the capacity or the will of the transitional authorities to organize them.

Under pressure in particular from West African countries, the colonels who overthrew President Ibrahim Boubacar Keïta on August 18, 2020 had set up transitional bodies last September-October (presidency, Prime Minister and government, legislative) and pledged to return power to elected civilian leaders within 18 months.

In February, in his general policy speech, the Prime Minister of the transitional government, Moctar Ouane, tried to reassure: "All means will be implemented to organize, within the agreed deadlines, free and transparent elections", had - he affirmed in front of the CNT, led by a military putschist.

Mali's international partners, who after a few weeks had taken note of the overthrow of President Keïta and the creation of these new institutions, in the name of the necessary stability in a country plagued by war for ten years, have recently put pressure on the strongmen of Bamako.

"Litmus test of the current transition"

At the UN Security Council in early April, the United States demanded a "final calendar confirming the dates of the electoral process".

"These elections represent the litmus test of the current transition and a necessary step towards the return of Mali to constitutional rule", declared at the same meeting the UN Assistant Secretary General for Peace Operations, Jean-Pierre. The cross.

"We encourage the transitional authorities to speed up preparations for the March 2022 elections," said French Deputy Ambassador to the UN, Nathalie Broadhurst.

Paris has been fighting the jihadists in the Sahel since 2013, with currently 5,100 men.

Since 2017, they have benefited from the support of the G5 Sahel joint force (Mauritania, Mali, Chad, Burkina Faso, Niger).

In addition to the institutional challenges, Mali, like its Nigerien and Burkinabè neighbors, is caught in a whirlwind of violence.

Jihadist groups - some affiliated with Al-Qaeda, another with the Islamic State organization - have swarmed on the fertile ground of an absence of the state in the immense rural areas, of corruption and of the numerous abuses of the national armies .

Militias, sometimes self-proclaimed self-defense and sometimes state-backed, have also arisen.

In a report published Tuesday, a citizen coalition of NGOs in the sub-region worried that the "first victims" of this conflict were civilians.

The number of civilians killed "has never been higher than in 2020", according to this report.

With AFP

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