Seçim desteğinin kutuplaşması: Nijerya başkanlık seçiminin bir analizi

This study explores the underlining factors that define electoral support in a bipolar religious nation with 50.5% of her population Muslims and 48.2% Christians, cutting across more than 250 ethno-linguistic groups that is divided between two regional blocs?Christian South and Muslim North to answer the question: what accounts for the polarization of electoral support in the 2011 presidential election in Nigeria along ethno-religious and regional blocs? I argued within this study that the shift in the assumed strategic power position of the major ethnic group who are predominantly Muslims living in the northern part of Nigeria necessitated a struggle for the reacquisition of their power position. This attempt met with stiff resistance by the other ethnic groups living in the South who are predominantly Christians. This is the source of the polarization of electoral support along the regional blocs of Christian South and Muslim North. I look at ethnic and religious distribution of the major political, military, economic and judicial position within the country. This power position of the Muslim North is ?assumed??because of the fact that, it is not inherent to this group rather it was acquired through political means, precisely through the military intervention into politics over a long period of time and could be lost through political means. It is ?strategic? based on the prolong grip on state power by the military dictators from the Muslim North and the subsequent use of this state power to make policies that favoured these groups and to raise key persons in this group to key positions in the state. Within the course of this study I found out that there was a distortion in the long standing order in the political leadership of the country within the first eight years of the fourth republic that led to the loss of the security derived from the feeling of being in control by the Northern bloc. A struggle then emerged to restore the old order on the one hand and to maintain the new status quo on the other hand between the North and South respectively. Thus political struggle/agitation in the next election was blown out of proportion by igniting ethnic and religious sentiment between and within the blocs in the 2003 and 2011 presidential elections, which resulted in the polarization of electoral support along the Christian South and Muslim North in these elections.