The second round of the presidential election in Cape Verde was held on Sunday.

The Cape Verde Electoral Commission is reporting the following result with 99.28% of all votes counted:

Jorge Carlos Fonseca (Movimento para a Democracia/Movement for Democracy, MPD), 54.1%
Manuel Inocêncio Sousa (Partido Africano da Independência de Cabo Verde/African Party of Independence of Cape Verde, PAICV), 45.9%

This is a really interesting result because only in February 2011 the PAICV won an absolute majority in the legislative election. Therefore, this result will create the first case of cohabitation in Cape Verde when President-elect Fonseca is inaugurated.

The Expresso das Ilhas newspaper is reporting that Prime Minister José Maria Neves has already sent a message to President-elect Fonseca stating that he (the PM) is ready to engage in “institutional collaboration” with the new president.

Cape Verde is a premier-presidential system. So, the new president cannot dismiss the prime minister. In any case, the PAICV has 37 of the 72 seats in the legislature. However, according to the chapter in Costa Lobo and Amorim Neto’s book on lusophone semi-presidentialism, the Cape Verdean president scores 8/9 on the Siaroff index of presidential power, which is a very high score indeed, and 9.5 on the Metcalf-revised version of the Shugart and Carey presidential powers index, which would make the president more powerful than the French, Romanian and Polish presidents, according to Tavits’ recent study.

Therefore, the president is much more than a ceremonial figure. This is likely to lead to an interesting situation over the next few years.