Veteran Ivory Coast President Alassane Ouattara said Tuesday he will seek a fourth term in the west African country, as tensions rise over the exclusion of many opposition candidates.
Ouattara, 83, who has led Ivory Coast since 2011, will be the overwhelming favourite to win the October 25 vote.
Ouattara had already been nominated by his ruling Rally of Houphouetists for Democracy and Peace (RHDP) party, but he waited until Tuesday to confirm he would run.
The opposition has argued a fourth Ouattara term would be unconstitutional.
"I am a candidate because the constitution of our country allows me to run for another term and my health permits it," he said, adding that the world's top cocoa producer was "facing unprecedented security, economic, and monetary challenges, the management of which requires experience".
For the past decade Ouattara has steered Ivory Coast to relative stability, in a turbulent region which has seen a rash of military coups.
Yet critics accuse him of tightening his grip on power.
The opposition has also accused the authorities of using courts to exclude opponents. The government insists the judiciary acts independently.
The two main opposition parties have launched a joint campaign to demand the reinstatement of their barred leaders ahead of the election.
- 'Attack on democracy' -
The alliance brings together the African People's Party of Ivory Coast (PPACI) -- led by former president Laurent Gbagbo -- and the Democratic Party of Ivory Coast (PDCI), the country's largest opposition force, headed by former international banker Tidjane Thiam.
Gbagbo, his former right-hand man Charles Ble Goude and ex-prime minister Guillaume Soro have been struck from the electoral register due to criminal convictions.
Thiam was also excluded by the judiciary over nationality issues.
"The announcement made today by Mr Ouattara constitutes a violation of our constitution and a new attack on democracy," Thiam said in a statement.
A lawyer for Thiam, Mathias Chichportich, told AFP that a United Nations human rights committee had called for Ivory Coast to allow the opposition figure to "exercise his political rights" and run in the upcoming vote.
Likewise an official from Gbagbo's party, Damana Pickass, told the press Ouattara's mandate was "unconstitutional".
Pascal Affi N'Guessan, who will run to unseat Ouattara for the Ivorian Popular Front (FPI), called it "a candidacy as illegal as his third".
Critics had already questioned the legality of Ouattara's third mandate as the law limited him to two, until the adoption of a new constitution in 2016 reset the term counter to zero.
The opposition boycotted the 2020 vote and Ouattara won by a landslide, with at least 85 people killed in the ensuing unrest.
- Power struggle-
Ouattara worked at the International Monetary Fund and the west African regional bank BCEAO and entered politics when Ivory Coast's founding president, Felix Houphouet-Boigny, appointed him to chair a body on economic recovery in the midst of an economic crisis.
As Houphouet-Boigny's health worsened, Ouattara assumed increasing responsibility for the country's affairs.
When the ailing president died in December 1993, Ouattara was embroiled in a brief power struggle with Henri Konan Bedie, the speaker of parliament, and then left Ivory Coast to join the IMF.
In 1995, he joined the Rally of the Republicans (RDR) party and planned on running as their presidential candidate.
But he was barred from doing so following new laws requiring both parents of a candidate to be of Ivorian birth and for the candidate to have lived continuously in Ivory Coast prior to an election.
He was barred from polls in 2000 on the same grounds. A failed coup two years later led to a civil war that divided the country into rebel-held and predominantly Muslim north, where Ouattara drew much of his support, and the government-controlled Christian-majority south.
Ouattara, who was subjected to violence during the unrest, left the country but returned to contest an election in 2010.
Then-president Gbagbo's refusal to concede electoral defeat to Ouattara led to more unrest, in which more than 3,000 people were killed, before Ouattara became president in 2011.
Gbagbo was acquitted of crimes against humanity by the International Criminal Court in The Hague but still has a conviction in Ivory Coast stemming from the post-election crisis that ended his rule.
