2019 Namibian general election
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| Registered | 1,358,468 | ||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||
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Presidential election | |||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||
| Turnout | 60.82% | ||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||
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96 of the 104 seats in the National Assembly 49 seats needed for a majority | |||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||
This lists parties that won seats. See the complete results below. | |||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||
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General elections were held in Namibia on 27 November 2019.[1] Ballots were cast using electronic voting.[2] A total of eleven candidates ran for the presidency and fifteen political parties contested the National Assembly elections.
Hage Geingob of SWAPO was re-elected to the presidency, although his vote share was reduced from 87% in 2014 to 56%, their lowest vote share for a presidential election in the party's history.[3] SWAPO also retained their majority in the National Assembly, but lost their two-thirds supermajority.[4] SWAPO had held a two-thirds majority since the 1994 elections.[5]
The President of Namibia is elected using the two-round system; if no candidate receives more than 50% in the first round of voting, a run-off will be held. No previous presidential votes in Namibia have gone to a second round.[6]
The 104 members of the National Assembly consist of 96 elected members and eight (non-voting) members appointed by the President.[7] The 96 elected members are elected by closed list proportional representation from a single nationwide district. Seats are allocated using the largest remainder method.[8]
Political parties
SWAPO
SWAPO was viewed as the clear favorite going into the 2019 election, although the rise of new parties, such as the Landless People's Movement, was predicted to cause a split in the vote.[9] In 2014, the ruling SWAPO Party announced a gender equality system where half of SWAPO's seats in parliament would be held by women. The party also embraced what it called a "zebra system", whereby if a minister was a woman, the deputy minister would be a man, and vice versa. Due to there being more male SWAPO MPs than female MPs, SWAPO put forward plans to expand parliament to remove the risk of male MPs losing their seats as a result of this gender equality policy.[10] This change, raising the number of seats from 78 to 104, was enacted in 2014, although it was officially framed as allowing for wider representation of the population.[11]
Opposition
Opposition parties had the objective of removing SWAPO's two-thirds majority in the National Assembly. The Namibian Economic Freedom Fighters (NEFF) and the Republican Party (RP), both without a realistic chance in the previous elections, withdrew their presidential candidates in early November and instead endorsed the independent candidate Panduleni Itula.[12] The United Democratic Front (UDF) in turn withdrew their candidate to back McHenry Venaani, presidential candidate of the Popular Democratic Movement (PDM) and leader of the official opposition. In August 2019, the two parties signed a coalition agreement for the coming legislative period, allocating parliamentary seats 6, 13 and 18 to the UPM, and the others to PDM, in an entity to be known as the PDM-UPM coalition.[13] The Rally for Democracy and Progress (RDP) formed a coalition with the Christian Democratic Voice (CDV), both parties supported Mike Kavekotora of the RDP.[14]
Parties that contested the legislative election
The following parties fielded candidates to contest the legislative election:[15][16][17][18]
Campaign
Ten candidates contested the presidential elections, with Hage Geingob of SWAPO widely expected to win a second term as president.[19][20] For the first time, an independent candidate, Panduleni Itula, ran for president. Esther Muinjangue of the National Unity Democratic Organisation (NUDO) was the first female presidential candidate in Namibia.[21]
