Two elections with very different conduct: Liberia’s ‘peaceful’ vs. Madagascar’s ‘tense’

Votes are being tallied in two African states — Liberia and Madagascar — and while their final results are still forthcoming, what is clear is the starkly different assessment of their respective conducts — peaceful in the former but tense in the latter.
Liberia’s incumbent, George Weah, a former soccer star whose administration had faced accusations of corruption, announced that he had lost his bid for re-election in a knife-edge vote to a 78-year-old former vice president and opposition leader, Joseph Boakai. Meanwhile, Madagascar’s President Andry Rajoelina, an entrepreneur and former DJ, has taken a predictably commanding early lead in his bid for re-election in a vote marked by low turnout and an opposition boycott, preliminary results have shown.
Observers from the European Union and the West African regional bloc ECOWAS on Thursday (16 November) congratulated Liberia on the “largely” peaceful conduct of the second round of the presidential election. According to the EU mission, the Electoral Commission (NEC) has demonstrated its ability to peacefully conduct the first elections to be held without the presence of the United Nations mission that was present in Liberia between 2003-2018. In contrast, the conduct of the election in Madagascar marred by low turnout, complaints about electoral irregularities and palpable tension in the capital, Antananarivo, where authorities imposed a night-time curfew after the torching of some polling stations earlier in the week.