18- July-2024″ African elections show democracy should not be taken for granted.
Some polls in Africa’s 2024 election marathon give hope, others raise alarm.
Rwanda’s Paul Kagame has won a landslide victory in the presidential elections held on July 15. His Rwanda Patriotic Front (RPF) party also emerged victorious in the legislative vote, retaining its parliamentary majority.
With more than 99 percent of the vote in Kagame’s favour, this presidential election appears to be a repeat of the previous three, where the incumbent secured expected victories.
Kagame’s re-election unfolds against a broader context of many other important electoral races across Africa this year. Presidential elections have already taken place in the Comoros, Senegal, Chad and Mauritania,South Africa held a parliamentary poll in May.
Elections are now coming up in Algeria (September), Mozambique, Tunisia and Botswan, Mauritius, and Namibia , Ghana, South Sudan, Guinea Bissau and Guinea
With this high concentration of national votes, 2024 can serve as an indicator of where democracy in Africa is heading and offer important lessons.
Mali and Burkina Faso’s military leaders have indefinitely iced polls initially scheduled for February and July this year, promising a later date but leaving no doubt about their intention to be candidates whenever polls take place.
In Guinea, it is very likely that Colonel Mamady Doumbouya, who took power in a coup in 2021 and recently minted himself as a general, will be a candidate in the December election. In Niger and Gabon, putschists are also running the show while the government in the Democratic Republic of Congo recently averted a coup.
Worrying developments elsewhere in the world may also have a negative impact on the African continent. The United States, with more than 200 years of liberal democratic traditions, risks a democratic retreat as it looks set to re-elect Donald Trump, a convicted felon, with openly authoritarian tendencies and an unapologetic “America First” agenda.
Labour may have returned to power in the UK and France narrowly escaped a far-right takeover, but the far-right surge – with its threat to liberal democracy – is an undeniable reality in Europe
Two victories for democracy
Senegal and South Africa saw two of the most stunning election outcomes so far this year. In March, Senegalese voters elected 44-year-old Bassirou Diomaye Faye as the country’s youngest president ever. Just 10 days prior, he was a political prisoner and Senegal’s democracy appeared on the edge of a precipice.
In May, South Africa’s African National Congress (ANC) lost its majority in Parliament for the first time since the end of apartheid and the beginning of free elections in 1994. This forced the party to negotiate its first coalition government ever with the Democratic Alliance (DA) party, its ideological opposite, which came second in the polls. This is untested waters for the country’s political system and democracy.