With Rivals Restricted, Kagame Looks Set for Another Term in Rwanda

The Central African nation is voting on a potential fourth term for President Paul Kagame. Opposition figures say they have been threatened and arbitrarily detained.

The winding roads to this town in northern Rwanda were lined with election posters for the man who has been president for decades: Paul Kagame.

Businesses were ordered shut and women swept the streets before the president’s convoy swooshed by, heading for a huge rally in a stadium bedecked with the governing party’s red, white and sky-blue colors. Tens of thousands of cheering people, largely mobilized by party operatives, greeted his arrival.

A day later, Mr. Kagame’s main challenger, Frank Habineza, arrived in the same town without a fanfare. His party’s colors — green, yellow and white — were absent from the now-busy streets. A few dozen people, many of them his own election workers, gathered under a tent by the street to listen to him. Security forces hovered nearby.

Two parallel Rwandas were on display on successive days in Byumba — a town of verdant, rolling valleys, 25 miles north of the capital, Kigali — showcasing how President Kagame is wielding the power of his decades-long incumbency in an election campaign in the Central African nation.

On Monday, more than nine million people are casting their ballots in a presidential and parliamentary election that analysts and rights groups say is a rubber-stamp vote with a foregone conclusion. Even though hundreds of candidates have registered to run for various seats, only Mr. Kagame’s face dots the landscapes of this hilly, landlocked nation of 14 million people.