Two weeks before the elections to renew the parliament and elect the new president of Liberia, a West African country with 5 million inhabitants, the counting of the ballot papers has finally been completed. As widely expected, there will be a run-off, and the two presidential candidates will be the current president George Weah, who obtained 43.83 percent of the votes, and Joseph Boakai, very close, with 43.44. In the first round, approximately 1.9 million people voted out of the 2.4 million eligible voters. The ballot is scheduled for November 14th.
Weah is 57 years old and a very successful former footballer: he played for many years at Milan and then founded the populist party Congress for Democratic Change, with which he was elected president in 2017. Boakai, on the other hand, is 78 years old and is part of the Party of ‘Unità, center-right, and was vice-president between 2006 and 2018. The election of Weah, who won in the run-off against Boakai with 61.5 percent of the votes, was accompanied by great hopes for change, but in part disappointed. In his term he succeeded in expanding access to public education, but he did not solve the problem of corruption. He did not even significantly improve the economic situation of Liberia, which remains among the poorest countries in West Africa also due to two violent civil wars and a major Ebola epidemic, which officially ended in 2015.
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