Five years after winning office in a vote marred by violence, Ivory Coast President Alassane Ouattara looks set to win a new mandate Sunday in an election seen as critical to sealing the peace.
Ouattara's election campaign has focused on his efforts to revive the economy of the world's top cocoa producer, ravaged by months of post-election violence in 2010-2011 in which some 3,000 people died.
But voter apathy and opposition criticism of the country's electoral commission threaten to undermine the credibility of the October 25 vote.
Photos circulating on social media this week show staff soundly sleeping in offices where Ivory Coast's 6.3 million voters can pick up their election ID cards, highlighting a lack of public interest in the ballot.
Just days before the vote, the national electoral commission (CEI) decided to extend distribution of the cards until Wednesday, October 21.
The move came after two presidential candidates pulled out of the race, denouncing it as "a masquerade".
Ouattara's 2010 election was the last but deadliest chapter in a conflict that had divided the country into a rebel-held north and a loyalist south for almost a decade.
Then president Laurent Gbagbo refused to concede defeat to the former deputy head of the IMF, triggering the bloodshed. He is now in a Dutch jail, awaiting his November war crimes trial by the International Criminal Court in The Hague.
- Ouattara needs 'strong vote' -
It was hoped this week's vote would turn the page on the past and help Ivory Coast become the stable West African powerhouse it once was.
Ouattara, a tall 73-year-old economist married to a Frenchwoman, is hoping for a clear first-round victory.
"In the next five years we will strengthen our institutions to consolidate peace and harmony," he pledged on the campaign tail.
He heads a coalition including his own Rally of Republicans (RDR) party and the Democratic Party of Ivory Coast (PDCI) set up by the country's founding father Felix Houphouet-Boigny.
Ouattara needs "a strong vote", said his biographer Cisse Ibrahim Bacongo. "That is how he will win unquestionable legitimacy."
But his camp is worried. "Our enemy is abstention," said Alphonse Soro, a parliamentarian who heads the RDR youth movement. "The problem is how to convince people to come out and vote."
- Gbagbo's ghost -
As criticism of the election commission mounts, former foreign affairs minister Amara Essy suspended his candidacy "to avoid becoming an accomplice in an electoral masquerade".
"If we don't take care we'll head into a post-election crisis that will be one post-election crisis too many," he warned.
Three days later he was followed by another eminent contender for the top job, ex-parliament speaker Mamadou Koulibaly.
Other Ivorian political VIPs, former premier Charles Konan Banny, MPs Konan Kouadio and Kacou Gnangbo, as well as businessman Simeon Konan Kouadio, have suggested they too could boycott the vote.
Only four of the eight contenders still in the race have so far signed "a code of good conduct for a peaceful election" drafted by the electoral commission,
Some in the opposition want the commission dissolved on the grounds it favours Ouattara.
Ouattara's main challenger is seen as being Pascal Affi N'Guessan, a former prime minister under Gbagbo and leader of the Ivorian Popular Front.
Founded by the ex-president the party is now split between those backing N'Guessan's run for president and die-hard Gbagbo loyalists, who are boycotting the vote.
Some 34,000 troops, including 6,000 UN peacekeepers, will be deployed during the election.
To ward off fears of electoral fraud, polling stations will send vote counts electronically to the electoral commission in Abidjan and voters will be identified biometrically.