Nobel Peace Prize winner Ramos-Horta leads recount of elections in East Timor

Nobel Peace Prize winner José Ramos-Horta leads the first round of the presidential elections in East Timor, ahead of outgoing President Francisco Guterres, but without an absolute majority, according to a count announced by the authorities on Monday.

The former Portuguese colony is thus heading towards a second round between these two candidates, in one of the most competitive elections in the history of this small Southeast Asian country.

José Ramos-Horta, 72, won 46.58% of the votes, compared to 22.16% for the outgoing head of state, after the preliminary counting of all the ballots.

“This is the result of the counting of 12 municipalities, the Oecusse region (Timorese enclave in Indonesia) and the diaspora,” Acilino Manuel Branco, director general of the Technical Secretariat for Electoral Administration (STAE), told television.

The results have yet to be verified and validated definitively by the national electoral commission, which will confirm the second round, scheduled for April 19, he said.

East Timorese voters elected their president on Saturday for a five-year term among 16 candidates.

The current president, Francisco Guterres, 67 years old and at the head of the Fretilin party, was a candidate for re-election.

But Horta, who was already president between 2007 and 2012, left his retirement in the face of what he considers a violation of the Constitution by the outgoing president. It is supported by the National Congress for the Reconstruction of Timor (CNRT).

A confrontation between the two main parties has been economically and politically paralyzing the country for several years.

East Timor, with 1.3 million inhabitants, was a Portuguese colony until 1975 and then bloody occupied by Indonesia until its independence in 2002.

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