Kenyan’s Odinga on verge of becoming President

Raila Odinga, the smiling eminence of Kenyan politics, has an admirable record of contesting national elections and a miserable record of winning them. Since his first presidential run 30 years ago, Mr. Odinga, 77, has been at the centre of almost every election, mostly due to the aggrieved loser claiming to have been cheated of his rightful victory. With the most recent polls showing Mr. Odinga leading over his rival, William Ruto, the big prize seems to be within his grasp. Kenyan elections can be messy and unpredictable, with few exceptions - a lesson that Mr. Odinga knows better than most. The blood of the high office is in his blood. The son of Kenya's first vice-president and an avowed leftist, Mr. Odinga entered politics soon after returning to Kenya from his engineering studies in communist East Germany in the 1960s.

After an unsuccessful coup attempt against Daniel arap Moi, Kenya's longest-serving ruler, he was detained for six years and arrested twice after. He was the leader of the protests that culminated in Kenya's first multiparty election in 1992, although the first truly free vote would take another decade.

He first ran for the presidency in 1997 and again in 2007 when a disputed result led to widespread violence that killed over 1,200 people. He tried again in 2013 and 2017 to lose to Uhuru Kenyatta, Kenya's outgoing president. The outsider who could command newspaper front pages, the rabble-rouser who cast himself as the champion of the marginalized, the loser who crowned himself the People's President after losing the 2017 election, has remained defiantly present through it all. Odinga is from the fourth largest group — the Luo — who have long resented being excluded from power. An Odinga presidency would also make history through his running mate, Martha Karua, who would become Kenya's first female vice president.

But if Mr. Odinga is finally on the verge of achieving his dream, he is doing it as an insider thanks to the so-called handshake, his contentious 2018 pact with President Kenyatta that ensured him the president s backing in this race.

The deal was widely criticized as another elite pact and was supposed to heal Kenya's political divisions. One of its major provisions, a plan to amend the Constitution, was struck down by the courts in March. The handshake has earned Mr. Odinga precious votes from some of Mr. Kenyatta's supporters, putting him one major step closer to the job he has coveted for decades.