The Atlantic archipelago of Cape Verde has 491,575 registered voters. On 17 May, according to multiple outlets [7, 13, 15], a majority of them chose not to vote. The African Party for the Independence of Cape Verde won 37 seats in the 72-member National Assembly — enough to govern, not enough to convince the country it had asked for one. Abstention, as João Santos Luís put it to Inforpress [15], won the election.
This is not new. Cape Verde's turnout has been declining for a decade. What is new is that a government formed on the back of record abstention must now govern as though it were wanted. The Parliamentary Party expressed disappointment [2, 3, 5, 14] that the result would continue to polarise the chamber. One reads that and thinks: polarisation is not the country's most pressing democratic symptom when half the country has stopped showing up.