Voters will head to polling booths across Mauritania on June 29, in elections set to be a litmus test for the West African country’s young and fragile democracy.
A vast but sparsely populated desert country with some 4.5 million people, Mauritania has long been beset by coups and military rule. The country has been under military dictatorship for nearly all of its 64 years since gaining independence from France in 1960. Its first peaceful power transfer came in 2019, when then-incumbent President Mohamed Ould Abdel Aziz chose not to run for a third term.
