Liberia has just elected its next president! And the winner is …
George Weah!
According to the Wall Street Journal, Weah racked in 61.5 percent of the vote with 98 percent of total votes reported. His opponent, current vice president Joseph Boakai, only obtained 38.5 percent of the votes so far.
Weah made history as the first and only African to obtain FIFA’s World Player of the Year title in 1995. As a soccer star, he played for AC Milan and Chelsea, according to the Financial Times.
After retiring from the sports world, Weah returned home and first worked as a philanthropist before becoming a politician. He ran for president back in 2005, and has been a senator since 2015.
Always popular in the nation's poorer communities, such as the ones he grew up in in Liberia's capital, Monrovia, Weah grew his base during the election by presenting himself as a candidate outside of the establishment capable of delivering real change.
“It is time for the new breed of leaders to take the stage,” Weah said at a rally just before the election.
At that same rally, Weah told supporters that the his rival Boakai and the current president Ellen Johnson-Sirleaf "had 12 years of leadership that you gave them, but they did not improve your conditions." He also added, “My record as a proven patriot and an achiever is there for all of you to see.”
The 51-year-old will be succeeding Africa's first female president, Johnson-Sirleaf, a Nobel Peace Prize winner credited with guiding the country through a devastating Ebola outbreak. She has also been lauded for bringing stability after a history of conflict, rebuilding roads, setting up a reliable power grid and for reconnecting Liberia to its international partners.
However, she has been criticized for being ineffectual at rooting out corruption and for not doing enough to limit ever-widening income inequality.
Weah's rivals for the presidency argued that he lacked both the education and experience to tackle these problems. One of his opponents in the first round of voting, Benoni Urey told the public, “The executive mansion is not a soccer academy. It is where serious business occurs.”
Weah acknowledged during the campaign that he lacked the overseas education and business empires many other presidential candidates had, but said that he had something none of them did: "No person says: ‘George hurt me. He’s a wicked man.’”
Rodney Sieh, a political analyst, told the Times that "for many [Weah] can do no wrong," and after Weah's win was announced, that showed when hundreds of Liberians took to the streets of Monrovia to celebrate Weah's victory.
This election was a historic one. It marks Liberia's first independently ran election since the end of its civil wars. The transfer of power from Johnson-Sirleaf to Weah will be the nation's first democratic transfer of power in over seven decades.
“This is historic, as the first transition from [one] democratically elected president to another in modern-day Liberia,” said Chris Fomunyoh, the regional director for U.S.-based National Democratic Institute. “From being the first country to elect a female president Liberia becomes the first to elect a former soccer player [as] president.”
“I am so glad and happy that we now have our president who will bring a change,” one Weah supporter, Love Norrision told WTOP. “We are young people and have suffered in this country for so long.”
