In a year when election upsets have changed southern Africa’s political landscape, Namibia’s governing party has bucked the trend, winning the mineral-rich country’s general election, the electoral commission there said on Tuesday.

For the first time in its history, Namibia has also elected a female president. The winner, Netumbo Nandi-Ndaitwah, joins the small number of women who have led countries in Africa.

Ms. Nandi-Ndaitwah, 72, served as the country’s deputy prime minister and minister of international relations and cooperation under President Hage G. Geingob, who died in February. An interim president was put in charge but did not run in the election.

Ms. Nandi-Ndaitwah, who won 57.31 percent of the presidential vote, led the South West Africa People’s Organization, or SWAPO, which has governed Namibia for more than three decades, since independence. SWAPO won 51 out of 96 seats in Parliament, a decrease from the 63 seats it won in the 2019 election. The lost seats were most likely a reflection of widespread frustration with the country’s stagnant economy.

Panduleni Itula and his Independent Patriots for Change, which was founded in 2020 by a group of politicians who broke away from SWAPO, won second place, with 20 seats. Thirteen other opposition parties shared the rest.

“We have made commitments and I am saying to you we are going to do what we have told you,” Ms. Nandi-Ndaitwah said on Tuesday in Windhoek, the capital. Mr. Itula and other opposition leaders boycotted the election commission’s announcement in protest of the results and the commission’s handling of the vote.

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Historically, voters who were unable to make it to the polls on Election Day had to request absentee ballots. But mail and absentee ballots now function effectively the same in many states. The terminology used varies; Minnesota, South Dakota and Virginia mostly refer to early voting ballots as absentee.

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