Hommam Al Nassim 
The Independent National Electoral Commission (INEC) in Mauritania has set the twenty-second of June 2024 as the date for the presidential election.
The thirteen loyalist parties were quick to ask the current president, Mohamed Ould Cheikh Ghazouani, to run for a second term, which confirms that the way is open for the current president to continue ruling Mauritania, a continuation supported by international actors who believe that Mauritania under Ghazouani’s rule constituted an exception in a region ravaged by military coups.
Hamadi Ould Sidi Mokhtar, head of the National Rally for Reform and Development (RND), criticized the circumstances surrounding the upcoming presidential elections, saying in a speech to his party’s Shura Council that the upcoming presidential election will be organized in light of an unprecedented state of shaking confidence in the electoral system, especially in its supervisors after the recent elections, in which most of the political spectrum agreed, according to him, that the level of transparency and integrity in them has declined significantly.
The head of the Tagammu party called on the authorities to speed up the reform of what he called “the dysfunctional situation before it is too late, to ensure the transparency and integrity of the electoral process”.
President Ghazouani benefits from appeasement from the long-standing opposition parties that signed a republican charter with his party that includes the president’s commitment to political reforms in exchange for this understanding. But President Ghazouani faces opposition from Tagammu Islamists, who seek to build an opposition pole that brings together small parties, disaffected groups, and ethnic minority politicians.
A youth political movement, led by Ahmed Ould Haroun, emerged on the Mauritanian scene in the run-up to the upcoming presidential elections, which handed over to the Ministry of Interior a file to license a party called the Movement for Liberation and Development.
Ould Haroun, a former adviser to the justice minister, called on the Mauritanian people to take part in a democratic political coup, stressing that it is the best, if not the only, solution to stop what he called “the farce and blindness in which Mauritania is going”.
Algeria ranks 85th in the World Happiness Index