Opposition leader Navin Ramgoolam, 77, has become the new prime minister of Mauritius after the ruling party suffered a landslide defeat in the general election on Nov. 10.
The country’s president Prithvirajsing Roopun said he had appointed Ramgoolam as the new prime minister after his Alliance de Changement (ADC) coalition won 62.6 percent of the votes in the election.
The ADC won 60 of the 62 seats up for election, according to state broadcaster Mauritius Broadcasting Corporation, and the ruling Militant Socialist Movement (MSM) failed to win a single seat.
The eight other seats in parliament will be nominated to individuals by the Electoral Supervisory Council.
In the previous parliament, the MSM held 42 of the 70 seats.
Mauritius is an archipelago in the Indian Ocean which was a British colony until winning independence in 1968.
People Have Chosen ‘Another Team’
The outgoing prime minister Pravind Jugnauth conceded defeat on Monday, saying his party was heading for a huge defeat.
Jugnauth said, “The population has decided to choose another team. I wish good luck to the country.”
The election campaign was dominated by a succession of embarrassing leaks of phone calls between Jugnauth, his wife Kobita, other party leaders, business people and police officers.
They first appeared on a TikTok account called Missier Moustass (Mr Moustache) and later on YouTube.
The government reacted by blocking the internet and social media, claiming there was, “a serious threat to national security and public safety.”
It is not clear who recorded the phone calls or who leaked them but Ramgoolam has promised to dismantle the country’s “spying system, so that Mauritians will be free to talk.”
In one leaked conversation, a senior police officer allegedly asked a pathologist to alter a post-mortem examination report about a person who had died in police custody. The Mauritius government later launched a judicial investigation into the death.
It will be Ramgoolam’s third time as prime minister.
He was in power from 1995 to 2000, and again from 2005 to 2014.
His father, Sir Seewoosagur Ramgoolam, was the first prime minister of Mauritius and led the country between 1968 and 1982.
Chagos Deal Counted For Nothing
Only last month Jugnauth’s government appeared to have got a major political coup when it was announced Britain would be handing over sovereignty of the nearby Chagos Islands to Mauritius.
But the kudos of the deal counted for nothing with the Mauritian electorate.
Diego Garcia, the largest island in the Chagos Archipelago and site of a major United States military base in the middle of the Indian Ocean leased from Britain in 1966. File Photo
Mauritius, 1,240 miles off Africa’s east coast, is one of the continent’s most stable democracies in the region and has a successful economy underpinned based on tourism, finance, and agriculture.
Around a million people were registered to vote in the election.
Jugnauth, who had been prime minister since 2017, has been the leader of the MSM since 2003, but is now expected to step down.
Associated Press and Reuters contributed to this report.
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