Rwanda’s President Paul Kagame won a landslide victory in the presidential election held on July 15. His Rwandan Patriotic Front (RPF) also won a parliamentary vote, maintaining its majority in parliament. With President Kagame receiving over 99% of the vote, this presidential election is likely to be a repeat of the last three elections in which the incumbent president predictably won.
Kagame’s re-election takes place in the broader context of many other important electoral contests across Africa this year. Comoros, Senegal, Chad and Mauritania have already held presidential elections, while South Africa held parliamentary elections in May.
Elections are currently scheduled in Algeria (September), Mozambique, Tunisia, Botswana (October), Somalia’s breakaway region of Somaliland, Mauritius, Namibia (November), Ghana, South Sudan, Guinea-Bissau and Guinea (December).
With such a high concentration of referendums, 2024 will be a beacon of where democracy in Africa is headed and will offer important lessons.
Two Triumphs of Democracy
Senegal and South Africa have produced two of the most surprising election results so far this year. In March, Senegalese voters elected 44-year-old Bashir Diomae Faye as the country’s youngest president ever. Just 10 days before, he had been a political prisoner and Senegal’s democracy seemed in danger.
In May, South Africa’s African National Congress (ANC) lost its parliamentary majority for the first time since the end of apartheid and the start of free elections in 1994. This forced the party to negotiate its first coalition government with the ideologically opposed Democratic Alliance (DA) party, which came in second in the opinion polls. This is uncharted territory for the country’s political system and democracy.
The Senegalese and South African elections are triumphs for democracy, given that incumbent-dominated ruling parties suffered major defeats in both cases. But neither election was smooth sailing, highlighting democratic fragility.
A few months before the election, Senegal was in the midst of a major political crisis as outgoing President Macky Sall engaged in political maneuvering, possibly to extend his term or at least to influence the outcome of the vote. In South Africa, after the vote, at least 20 political parties alleged fraud and called for a recount of the vote, while former President Jacob Zuma, leader of the Mkhonto weSizwe (MK) party, issued an ominous warning against “creating problems where there are none.”
Democracy has been taken for granted in Senegal and South Africa, as well as in Mali, Benin, Niger, and even Kenya. These cases demonstrate the limitations of the “two regime changes” test used by American political scientist Samuel Huntington to assess the stability of a state’s democracy: whether two successive regime changes can occur without the breakdown of the democratic constitutional order.
They show that democratic complacency is a luxury we cannot yet afford. The contested results of the Comoros and Chad polls also lead to the same conclusion.
Comoros’ President Azali Assoumani and Chad’s President Mahamat Déby are incumbent military-style presidents who were re-elected amid allegations of fraud. Violent protests against the election results in Comoros reportedly left at least one person dead and 25 injured. In Chad, pre- and post-election violence fuelled by threats and intimidation has left at least 12 people dead.
Risks of incumbent election
While there are positive trends in some African elections, there are concerns, particularly in countries where incumbent presidents are running. Winner-take-all contests such as presidential elections can be problematic, and even more so in so-called incumbent presidential elections, where the incumbent president is also a candidate.
Given his personal involvement in the electoral process, the incumbent president is likely to maximize the advantages of incumbency, such as national resources and administrative machinery, for his own benefit.
This reduces the chances of an opposition victory, as Rwanda’s elections show. In principle, Kagame has never been elected unopposed. But the tightly controlled state apparatus has always ensured an uneven playing field in his favour by eliminating candidates who would arguably be the biggest challengers to his rule.
For example, ahead of the July 15 vote, the electoral commission rejected the candidacy of Diane Rwigara, perhaps Kagame’s most vocal critic to date, for incomplete paperwork. During the 2017 elections, she was subjected to systematic intimidation and was ultimately barred from running for lack of signature documentation. In April, a Kigali court also blocked the candidacy of Victor Ingabire, a fierce critic of Kagame, for her previous convictions on genocide denial and terrorism charges.
By the end of the year, there will be presidential elections in which this unfortunate reality, or worse, may become apparent. These will be played out in extremely fragile democracies, such as Tunisia, Guinea-Bissau, the breakaway regions of Somaliland, South Sudan, Guinea and Algeria.
The coup and the return of conservatives
It is also important to note that the 2024 election campaign is unfolding in a broader regional context, under less than ideal circumstances. More specifically, military coups have resurfaced and become the norm in Africa, and coup perpetrators are clearly in no rush to return to their barracks.
Military leaders in Mali and Burkina Faso have indefinitely frozen elections, originally scheduled for February and July this year, promising to reschedule them for a later date, but have left no doubt about their intention to run in elections whenever they are held.
In Guinea, Colonel Mamadi Doumbouya, who seized power in a 2021 coup and recently became a general, is very likely to run in December’s elections. Couptarians are also in power in Niger and Gabon, and in the Democratic Republic of Congo the government recently averted a coup.
Worrying developments in other parts of the world may also have adverse effects on the African continent. The United States, with over 200 years of liberal democratic tradition, is at risk of democratic backsliding with the assured reelection of Donald Trump, a convicted politician with clear authoritarian tendencies and an unapologetically “America First” agenda.
While the Labour Party has returned to power in the UK and France narrowly avoided a far-right takeover, the rise of far-right forces, which pose a threat to liberal democracy, is an undeniable reality in Europe.
For Africa, these developments are both tragic and worrying: the (re)election of far-right, populist and inward-looking governments in Western countries calls into question the West’s claims as a global model, especially for African and other countries that are already challenging Western notions of democracy.
Civil society and institutional support
Thus, while the electoral experiences of Senegal and South Africa are encouraging, regional and global realities and trends underscore why we must redouble our efforts to promote and protect democracy.
Democracy, whether established or not, is not something that can just be acquired and satisfactorily managed, but rather must be seen as a perpetual process that is constantly nourished and adapted to, even when on the surface there seems to be no need for it.
This requires creativity, innovation, collaboration, constant rethinking of approaches and, above all, decisive action. For example, it cannot be overstated that polling with non-incumbent candidates can increase the likelihood of political transition through the ballot box. But this is only possible if safeguards such as term limits are in place in the constitution and respected. Thus, there is a strong incentive to seek results when these are ignored.
Senegal and South Africa also offer lessons on curbing attacks on democracy and the values on which it is based.
The case of Senegal shows how the bold resistance of a strong civil society, a tenacious opposition and a courageous Constitutional Court can ultimately help deliver strong results in a complex political and electoral context.
The South African example shows that an informed public and a strong, resilient opposition can gradually chip away at the power of once-dominant parties.
A strong and informed civil society, political parties, strong institutions and political dialogue processes are clearly prerequisites for sustainable democracy – indeed, this is true not only in Africa but also elsewhere, given the worrying trends emerging, for example, in older Western democracies – and they must be strengthened and supported at all costs.
The views expressed in this article are the author’s own and do not necessarily reflect Al Jazeera’s editorial policy.
