Late Sunday evening, the Islamist-oriented National Rally for Reform and Development (Tawasul) party in Mauritania elected MP Hammadi Ould Sidi El Mokhtar as its new president.
Ould Sidi El Mokhtar, who is the third president in the history of the Islamic Party since its founding in 2007, succeeds outgoing President Mohamed Mahmoud Sidi.
The results of the voting at the end of the conference, which was held under the slogan "Together we achieve reform and win the bet", showed that the new leader of the party obtained 86% of the votes, while the outgoing president came second with 14% of them, after the competition was limited to them.
Local, Arab and Islamic personalities, and delegations from Algeria, Morocco, Tunisia, Senegal and Palestine participated in the conference, which the opposition party with the most representation in parliament (14 deputies) has been organizing every 5 years.
The party's fourth conference this year witnessed the election of MP Aisha Bona to head the committee supervising the conference, making her the first woman to head a party conference in the history of Mauritania.
The new president of the Tawasul party has been a member of the House of Representatives since 2018 for the province of Kiffa (center of the country), and comes from the state of Assaba, in which he led the Islamic Call since the nineties of the last century, and fought in it the battle to establish the first nucleus of Islamic political movements in Mauritania, where he was chosen in 2005 as coordinator of the initiative The "centrist reformists" in the state, from which the Tawasul party later emerged.
Transparent elections
During its fourth conference, the Tawasul party called for providing conditions for transparency for the upcoming legislative and local elections next May, and the party also called on state institutions to combat corruption and sluggishness in public services.
The election of Hammadi Ould Sidi Al-Mokhtar as the new leader of the Tawasul Party comes after major tremors that the party witnessed in previous periods and waves of backlash towards loyalty, which constituted a real test for it, which prompted some observers to question the extent of its ability to cohesion and the continued expansion of its popular base.
However, the party confirms that it has - for the first time - a base in all of Mauritania's 62 provinces, distributed over 15 states.
The number of party members rose to 130,000, an increase of about 30,000 from its third conference.
In addition, Tawasul is the only Mauritanian party that adopts democracy in theory and lives it in practice, according to what its members say.