The Special Electoral Court refrains from knocking a candidate out despite evidences of the ruling power’s abuses

“Mr. Rakoto Rahasinina Andrianjo Razanamasy’s formal request for presidential candidate Hery Rajoanarimampianina to be knocked out is rejected,” decided the Special Electoral Court. The game is over for Hajo Andrianainarivelo and his political electoral staff, who were for a short while pinning hopes of access to the second round on the Court’s potential decision to punish the presidential candidate openly and actively supported by the ruling power’s leader Andry Rajoelina.

According to the Malagasy electoral law, “whatever political institution, high ranking acting civil servant or military officer, electoral candidate proved to have used public power for the sake of influencing voters’ choices will be disqualified.” The HERY VAOVAON I MADAGASIKARA rather virtual party’s presidential candidate did get a boost from the aforesaid misuse of public power, yet the Special Electoral Court does not seem to mind much: “for being totally alien to the administration and no more any high ranking civil servant, the candidate cannot be likely to commit the mentioned offence by his own self.”

The explanation does not go down easily, considering that, merely a few days earlier, the transitional leader himself publicly owned up and boasted his active support to his former finance minister’s and electoral champion’s breakthrough, as well as the mobilization of the rest of his ministerial staff to the same end. The presidential candidate would not possibly get charged with public power abuse he fully benefitted from, for he did not commit them personally.

Andry Rajoelina openly violated the law without regards to the crisis settlement roadmap… again. He is eventually the one to be entitled to disqualification. The presidential election’s first round winner, Jean Louis Robinson declared in this sense that the transitional leader merely had to resign from his position in order to freely support any presidential candidate at will.

Besides “Neither candidates nor anyone of their staff or support committee are allowed to produce any more public speech of any form on air, namely either on TV or on radio waves, on the day before and during the voting process” the electoral law dixit. The Special Electoral Court might well acknowledge that one electoral advertisement was still broadcasted in Toamasina city on the day before the voting process by Andry Rajoelina’s VIVA TV channel in favor of Hery Rajaonarimampianina, does however decide that such a violation of the Electoral Law’s article 155 cannot be blamed on the concerned candidate, let alone entail his formal knock out.

The Special Electoral Court recalled that the use of public assets and powers on personal electoral purpose automatically induces the invalidation of the guilty candidates’ ballots in the concerned polling station, in which the offence got spotted, as a consequence. Such occurrences can however not prove enough to entail the knock out of a candidate.

As for the vote buying case which occurred in Maroalakely, Manakara district on October 25th 2013, Hery Rajaonarimampianina does come through unscathed as well. According to the law, any vote buyer or seller gets entitled to pay a fee twice as expensive as the promised or collected gain… a fair way to retrieve cash for the court, but still not a shadow of knock out in sight.

The Special Electoral Court committed amazingly much to justify in a most accurate way that disqualification was, legally speaking, off the point. But will Hery Rajaonarimampianina, his campaigning staff, Andry Rajoelina and his ministers, ever get sanctioned by any court at all for their deeds? How would the same abuses be possibly prevented in the run of the second decisive round?

The former transitional finance minister takes the widest possible distance from all of those facts, arguing to have ignored of his status of ruling power’s formal champion. Could he really know nothing of all of the year 2009’s putsch makers’ illegal actions which cleaned up his way to the presidential election’s second round? As a matter of fact, the Special Electoral Court itself had to resort to a vote concerning his potential disqualification. Hery Rajaonarimampianina might still be in but it was scarce. A report produced by a local TV station revealed though, that the presidential candidate owes his survival to one mere vote