"Angola's ruling party claims election victory-MPLA expects to win parliamentary majority, heralding end of José Eduardo dos Santos's near 40-year rule", 24 August 2017

...The ruling party...has claimed a widely expected election victory...The main opposition, National Union for the Total Independence of Angola (Unita), disputed the MPLA's projected result...Observers say Dos Santos...will still exert significant influence as party leader and that his family's grip on billions of dollars of businesses looks firmly established...But Jensen Kirk Søren, of Chatham House in London, said..."Lourenço is coming with a mandate. It's not fair to say this is simply cosmetic,"...A deep economic crisis has hit the MPLA's popularity in recent years..."There are no words to describe the level of corruption," said former prime minister Marcolino Moco...Lourenço joined the MPLA as a teenager and fought in the independence struggle against Portugal and the civil war with Unita that followed. The war, during which the MPLA (backed by Cuba and the Soviet Union) took on Unita (backed by the US and South Africa), devastated Angola...Lourenço, who studied in the Soviet Union before rising up the ranks in the military and the party, navigated the MPLA's swing from leftism to market capitalism with success. He has a reputation for relative probity and promised voters he would crack down on corruption. There was widespread concern about the fairness of the electoral process. The government has deployed state resources on a huge scale and has consistently repressed critics, moving on 12 August to ban protests and demonstrations by groups not running in the polls. A new law has given regulatory control of all media to a body administered by the government and the ruling party. Human Rights Watch said the election would be "marred by severe restrictions on freedom of expression and assembly". The European Union scrapped plans to observe the elections after Luanda failed to agree to a package of conditions, including access to all parts of the country during the poll. It sent a small team of experts instead. André da Silva Neto, head of Angola's election commission, said the poll was "an example of how elections should be carried out in any part of the world"...