The favorite candidate to win the race is incumbent President Paul Kagame, who aspires to remain in the executive chair for a fourth consecutive term in this country, where the wounds of the massacre of members of the Tutsi ethnic group at the hands of their Hutu compatriots stopped 30 years ago today are barely healing.

Conservative estimates put the number of Tutsis killed by Hutu supremacists at 800,000 in an orgy of bloodshed which Kagame stopped three months later when he took control of the capital at the helm of the Rwandan Patriotic Front.

Kagame filed his nomination in competition with two small-time rivals: Frank Habineza, leader of the Green Party, and Philippe Mpayimana, an independent, both defeated by him in the 2017 elections.

Although with little electoral opposition, Kagame faces criticism from political opponents who accuse him of wanting to be eternal in office and of unceremoniously and heavy-handedly pushing aside personalities in a position to make him real opposition and activists who criticize his drastic methods of government.

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