The polling exercise on September 28, 2014, was calm though boycotted by radical opposition parties.

Congolese are awaiting the results of Sunday, September 28 local council and Department elections. The Elections Organising Commission said  some 2 million Congolese  had to vote in  over 5,400 polling stations, BBC reported. The Commission reportedly signaled some organizational but surmountable hitches.

The polling process said to be in calm but without great affluence of voters, concerned 12 administrative Department councils and local councils in the six biggest towns of Congo. There is the high probability for President Denis Sassou Nguesso’s ruling party, the Congolese Labour Party “Parti congolais du travail” (PCT), to win the local elections.  The party has won all the elections in the country since Sassou Nguesso returned to power in 1997.

The PCT’s main challenger in the elections was the Pan-African Union for Social Democracy “L’Union panafricaine pour la démocratie sociale” (UPADS) that filed in candidates in half of the southern part of the country and in the two biggest cities, Brazzaville and Pointe-Noire.  There were also independent candidates.

The race for municipal and Department councilors was not really competitive as a group of 10 opposition political parties described as radical parties by the powers that be, boycotted the polls, explaining that they did not want to caution fraud. The Department councilors will constitute the electoral college who will vote Senators on October 12, 2014 so as to renew half of the Senators in the House. Reports say that the local elections ought to have taken place in 2013 but government postponed them with reason being the lateness in the revision of the electoral registers.