opposition groups boycotted the 1995 election in protest of changes to the electoral code : Bédié's PDCI retained power, but at the cost of harming its popular legitimacy. After 1995, the opposition continued to gain political ground. This political change coincided, from the late 1990s, with renewed economic downturn in Ivory Coast, exacerbated by the liberalisation of key agricultural sectors, notably coffee and cocoa, under an International Monetary Fund (IMF) structural adjustment programme. Ivoirité Ivory Coast has historically received large numbers of immigrants from neighbouring West African countries, especially Burkina Faso, and the flow of immigration was sustained after independence, both due to Ivory Coast's relative prosperity and due to the favourable policies of Houphouët-Boigny's government: for example, between 1960 and 1972, any person born in Ivory Coast could receive Ivorian citizenship, regardless of their parents' nationality. A majority of immigrants were Muslim: the share of Muslims in the Ivorian population increased from approximately six per cent in 1922 to 38.6 per cent in 1998. By then, they outnumbered the country's Christians, and were particularly numerous in the north of the country. Although immigration slowed from the 1990s, the Muslim population continued to grow in demographic importance due to a widening fertility gap. Academic analyses agree that a key root cause of the Ivorian civil war was the spread of nativist and xenophobic discourse, its mobilisation by opportunistic politicians, and the resulting ethnic tensions. Central in this regard was the rise of Ivoirité as an ideology and state policy under President Bédié, and its use to marginalise and exclude immigrants, their descendants, and certain groups of Ivorian citizens. Ethnic tensions, xenophobic sentiment, and related communal disputes in Ivory Coast predated Bédié's rule, but Houphouët-Boigny had been able to accommodate, manage, and suppress them. Under Bédié, however, the rise of Ivoirité politicised such disputes, making origin and religious affiliation "the prime markers of identity" in Ivory Coast. Land disputes were increasingly framed in ethnic terms, and became increasingly common in the late 1990s: Houphouët-Boigny's liberal land policies had extended access to land to both internal and foreign migrants, and rising urban unemployment in the 1990s – resulting in back-migration to rural areas – led to intensified competition over fertile land. Sociologist Francis Akindès notes that Ivoirité under Bédié had undertones which valorised Akan identity (the ethnic group of both Bédié and Houphouët-Boigny) and Christian identity; but the central variant of Ivoirité