The electoral commission of Tanzania said on Saturday that President Samia Suluhu Hassan had won a landslide victory in the country’s presidential election this week, a contest that has led to days of violent protests and Tanzania’s gravest political crisis in decades.
Ms. Hassan, 65, a politician from Zanzibar, won nearly 98 percent of the total votes cast in the election on Wednesday, the commission said. It said that almost 87 percent of the country’s 37.6 million registered voters had turned out. In the previous election in 2020, turnout was around 50 percent.
Election monitors have questioned the election’s integrity. Top members of the European Parliament said that the elections were “neither free nor fair.” They noted reports of electoral irregularities and the obstruction of observers and said the vote had taken place in an atmosphere of repression and fear.
Many people appear to have been killed in the protests in cities across the country, which were set off by anger that the two main opposition candidates had been disqualified from running. The government has denied that it used excessive force in responding to the demonstrators.
The precise toll of dead and injured in the protests is contested. The United Nations’ human rights commission said at least 10 people had been killed after security forces fired on protesters.
But Brenda Rupia, a spokeswoman for the main opposition party, Chadema, said she estimated that 200 people had been killed.
Ms. Rupia called on Friday for the military to take power, a highly unusual appeal for an opposition party. The call suggested a collapse of Chadema’s confidence in the country’s democratic process.
She said the military should remain in power only long enough to oversee the annulment of the election, the release of political detainees, the writing of a new constitution and a fresh vote.
“I call on the international community to urge the military to step in because people are dying,” Ms. Rupia said in a phone interview. “The government is announcing cooked results.”
In a broadcast on state television late on Thursday, the chief of defense forces, Gen. Jacob Mkunda, warned that the military would take “appropriate action” against the demonstrators, whom he described as criminals.
A 6 p.m. curfew in the country’s largest city, Dar es Salaam, has been in force since the election. On Friday, there was a heavy security presence in the city, and the streets were largely deserted.
The protests are a serious test for Ms. Hassan and a challenge for the ruling party of which she is a stalwart.
Tanzania, a country of about 70 million people, has been governed by her party, Chama Cha Mapinduzi, or Party of the Revolution, since 1977 under six successive presidents.
The election held little apparent peril for Ms. Hassan, given her party’s strength and the disqualifications of the main opposition leader, Tundu Lissu of Chadema, and the leader of a second opposition party, Luhaga Mpina of ACT-Wazalendo, by the electoral commission, whose members are appointed by the president.
That meant Ms. Hassan had to contend with only a host of smaller parties on the ballot.
In response, unrest erupted in a country that had prided itself on social cohesion since the long rule of its independence leader, Julius Nyerere, who stepped down in 1985. Chadema had called for an election boycott, but Ms. Rupia said that the scale of the demonstrations since Wednesday had stunned the party.
The protests, which have been prompted by political grievances and underlying economic discontent — including over youth unemployment — appeared in some ways similar to demonstrations that erupted in recent weeks in Morocco and in Madagascar, where the president was effectively driven from power.
Some protesters in Tanzania have also called for the army to take over, according to Richard Mbunda, a lecturer in political science at the University of Dar es Salaam.
One difference between the protests in Tanzania and those in other countries, however, is the presence of a prominent opposition figurehead. Mr. Lissu, who survived an assassination attempt in 2017 in which he was shot more than a dozen times, was charged with treason in April after calling for electoral reforms. His trial began this month.
Matthew Mpoke Bigg is a London-based reporter on the Live team at The Times, which covers breaking and developing news.
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