Bujumbura - Almost five million Burundians will go to the polls on Monday for parliamentary and local elections after weeks of unrest and violence that have forced 100 000 to flee the country.
Burundi has been in crisis since late April over President Pierre Nkurunziza's controversial bid to stand for a third consecutive five-year term, a move opponents have branded unconstitutional and a violation of a peace deal that paved the way to the end of 13 years of civil war in 2006.
Rights groups say over 70 people have been killed in the worst political crisis to hit the troubled central African nation since the war ended a decade ago.
Many fear a repeat of that violence, which split the country along ethnic lines, pitting the majority Hutus against the minority Tutsis and causing rival factions to emerge within those groups.
Parliamentary elections are due on June 29, ahead of the presidential vote on July 15.
Voters will elect 100 lawmakers, with lists to ensure parliament adheres to constitutional rules on ethnic and gender representation.
Parliament must be 60 percent Hutu - the group that accounts for some 85 percent of the population - with the remaining 40 percent of elected seats reserved for the minority Tutsi. At least 30 percent of seats must be held by women.
Observers warn of the potential for fraud, with an electoral commission made up of members close to the government, after two of the five original commissioners fled the country.
“Given the configuration of the electoral commission, what is important is probably not the vote but the count,” said Thierry Vircoulon of the International Crisis Group (ICG) think tank.
Several journalists who have been covering Burundi's crisis - which has seen weeks of street demonstrations, a violent police crackdown and a failed coup attempt by a section of the army - have complained of being subjected to threats, including death threats, by members of the police or other branches of the security forces.
Despite growing isolation, the government has defied international appeals to delay the series of elections, including from the United Nations, European Union, African Union and even its neighbours, the regional five-member East African Community (EAC) bloc.
While security forces crushed more than a month of protests from late April to mid-June against Nkurunziza's bid for another term in power, violence has resumed in recent days and has included a string of grenade attacks targeting both civilians and police that have left at least four dead and 40 wounded.
Gunshots are heard almost every night in the capital Bujumbura.
On one side is Nkurunziza's powerful ruling ex-rebel CNDD-FDD party, well-organised and with sizeable resources, facing off against a marginalised opposition out of power for five years following its boycott of elections in 2010.
The main opposition parties - the Tutsi UPRONA party and the ex-Hutu rebel National Liberation Forces (FNL) - have been co-opted into becoming government allies.
Nkurunziza's CNDD-FDD enjoys broad support amongst the rural population, but it must still win a two-thirds majority in parliament to pass laws - or strike coalition bargains with allies.
“The purpose for the presidential camp is to get more than two-thirds of the seats in parliament,” Vircoulon said.
As with the last polls, the CNDD-FDD relies on the absence of the opposition - which still threatens to boycott elections - and its ability to lure new allies in, said Christian Thibon, a French academic.
The chances of opposition victory are slim, after a period where campaigning was effectively blocked, analysts say.
“In the present state of the election campaign, I think their chances are generally zero,” Vircoulon said.
Thibon said the opposition “has no chance” to make a good result.
For the opposition, the key will be to avoid disappearing from the political field altogether.
“This could be the culmination of the marginalisation of the opposition that started in 2010. It could disappear at the institutional level,” Vircoulon said.
“It would be the end of parliamentary democracy in Burundi.”
Others said such a defeat would bring with it the risk of violence.
Without elected positions, the opposition may “reappear in other violent forms,” said Thibon.
AFP