The two favorite candidates for the presidential election in Liberia, Senator George Weah, African football legend, and outgoing vice President Joseph Boakai, appeared at the head of the provisional partial results announced by the Electoral Commission National (NEC).
These results, the first since the polls of Tuesday to designate the successor of Ellen Johnson Sirleaf, first woman elected head of state in Africa, did not allow however to determine if it would be necessary a second turn, said in a press conference the President of the NEC, Jerome Korkoya.
According to the provinces, these results go up to 48% of the votes, less in most of them.
In the province of the capital, Monrovia, where nearly 40% of the country’s 2.1 million voters were concentrated, George Weah got more than 50%, against 26.6% for Joseph Boakai, with only 14.8% of the votes counted.
On Tuesday, the outgoing president, who could not be reintroduced after two six-year terms, felt that Liberia was “ready for transition,” the first of one elected leader to another “for three generations.”
Sirleaf, a 78-year-old laureate of the Nobel Peace Prize in 2011, asked his fellow citizens to “measure the route” from the atrocious civil wars suffered by the country between 1989 and 2003, leaving 250,000 dead.
