The Portuguese head of state, Marcelo Rebelo de Sousa, will travel to Luanda for the ceremony in which João Lourenço will take office for a second term as President of Angola, scheduled for Thursday, 15 September.
“At the invitation of the Angolan authorities, the President of the Republic will travel to Luanda this week to attend, on September 15, the inauguration ceremony of the re-elected President of the Republic of Angola, João Lourenço”, reads a statement. note published on the official website of the Presidency of the Portuguese Republic on the Internet.
The inauguration date was announced on Thursday, after the Angolan Constitutional Court had validated the electoral results that gave the MPLA victory, rejecting two appeals, UNITA and CASA-CE.
On Friday, Marcelo Rebelo de Sousa congratulated João Lourenço on his re-election as President of Angola, in a message in which he said that the electoral process was “finished” and in which he also greeted Adalberto da Costa Júnior, leader of UNITA, the largest opposition party, “for the results obtained”.
In that message, the Portuguese head of state expressed “a wish that Angolan political life continues to develop in a climate of freedom, pluralism and tolerance”.
According to the final tabulation minutes of the August 24 general elections in Angola released by the National Electoral Commission, the Popular Movement for the Liberation of Angola (MPLA) and its candidate, the outgoing President, João Lourenço, obtained 51.17% of the votes. , followed by UNITA, with 43.95%.
With these results, the MPLA won 124 of the 220 deputies in the National Assembly, while UNITA elected 90 deputies, almost double what it had obtained in the 2017 elections.
The PRS won two seats in parliament by adding 1.14% of voters’ votes, the same number of deputies that won the FNLA and the Humanist Party of Angola (PHA), with 1.06% and 1.02% of votes respectively. .
The CASA-CE coalition, the APN and the P-Njango did not obtain seats in the National Assembly.
The investiture ceremony of the President of the Republic, João Manuel Gonçalves Lourenço, and of the Vice-President of the Republic, Esperança Maria Eduardo Francisco da Costa, will take place in Luanda, at Praça da República.
When João Lourenço took office for the first time as President of Angola, on September 26, 2017, after 38 years with José Eduardo dos Santos in power, Marcelo Rebelo de Sousa traveled to Luanda to represent the Portuguese State at that ceremony.
The Portuguese President made a state visit to Angola in March 2019, divided between the Angolan capital and the provinces of Benguela and Huíla, after having received João Lourenço in Portugal in November 2018.
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