Local view for "http://purl.org/linkedpolitics/eu/plenary/2007-05-23-Speech-3-292"
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"en.20070523.21.3-292"2
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".
Madam President, Commissioner, if a country is trying for the first time, in the aftermath of civil war and military dictatorships, to organise a peaceful handover of power, it follows that not everything is going to run ideally and perfectly smoothly.
We all agree, though, that the elections laid on were a farce, for what has become of democracy when a party rejoices in its own victory even before the votes have been counted, or what of the free choice of the voters when threats are made as the voting papers are counted out, when ballot slips are completed many times over, and when there seem, in rural districts, to have been scarcely any elections at all? What sort of message is it supposed to send out when ballot papers and election material arrive too late or not at all? How, then, are the people of Nigeria supposed to feel that they are being taken seriously?
The election process was meant to have brought the region stability and pointed people to a viable way into the future, but those hopes have proved illusory, leaving behind them a disillusioned people whose experience of elections is, at best, of a symbolic act, and an opposition whose threat to contest the election result will probably avail it but little, for the winning party is hardly likely to agree to new elections, so what we are left to consider is to what degree the European Union can and may exert pressure when power is handed over on 29 May, for the European Union itself has hardly been always the best of examples; it, too, has seen the repetition of referendums until the desired result was achieved, something that is highly dubious in democratic political terms."@en1
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