The first round of the presidential election in Côte d’Ivoire has been officially set for 25 October, the government announced on 5 August. “All will be done in order to meet this deadline”, declared Bruno Koné, spokesperson for the government, after a cabinet meeting in Abidjan.

The 2015 election is a crucial date for Côte d’Ivoire, after a decade of politico-military crisis which ended in five months of post-election deadly violence in 2010 and 2011. This post-election crisis was induced by the refusal of Laurent Gbagbo to acknowledge his defeat to the last presidential election, opposite Alassane Ouattara.

Laurent Gbagbo has been jailed for over three years at The Hague, awaiting his trial for crimes against Humanity at the International Criminal Court.

Faced with a scattered opposition, Alassane Ouattara is, according to observers, the big favourite of the next polls. A former senior official of the International Monetary Fund (IMF), the current Ivorian president can particularly boast of a real economic success since his rise to power. Under his care, Côte d’Ivoire, the top world producer of cocoa, is again experiencing high growth, about 9% per annum between 2012 and 2014, supported by massive public investments. According to a survey published in June by International Republican Institute, an American company, 77% of people surveyed said they are satisfied with the first term of the current president and two-thirds think the country is on a good path.

The opposition, however, denounces a bad distribution of growth in a country where about 50% of the population still lives below the poverty line. Detractors of Mr Ouattara thus put forward his “very mixed” track record in terms of transitional justice and national reconciliation.