After the DR-Congo went to the polls last month, Reuben Loffman explores what this controversial presidential election tells us about the Congolese electoral system and what we might expect from Félix Tshisekedi’s second term in office.
With international media attention absorbed by the Middle East, the recent elections in the DR-Congo in December, including a Presidential poll, have gone by with less media fanfare than those five years ago.
The incumbent President, Félix Tshisekedi, of the Union for Democracy and Social Progress (UDPS) party, was widely expected to retain the Presidency, which he has done with an alleged 73% of the vote. But the manner of his victory was less widely predicted.
Few expected the elections to be entirely free and fair. Instead, questions revolved around how unfair they would be. Tshisekedi had made a deal with his predecessor, Joseph Kabila, in the aftermath of the last Presidential election in December 2018 to gain power. Given that Tshisekedi was now the incumbent, the question was how he would attempt to maintain his power after his first term and whether he would do so fairly.
The run up to the election was hardly promising in this regard. Very few Presidential opposition candidates, of whom there were either twenty-four or twenty-six, believed that voter registration, which had been ongoing since late 2022, was successful. Opposition candidates, such as Martin Fayulu, alleged that the voter registration lists were fraudulent and consequently threatened to boycott the election entirely. In the end, however, Fayulu and the other opposition leaders decided to take part in the Presidential contest.
When election day finally came around on 20 December 2023, the creaking Congolese electoral system slowly shuddered into gear, but its weaknesses were quickly exposed. The independent joint-vote monitoring mission of the Catholic Church and Congolese Protestant churches said that it had received 5,402 reports of ‘incidents at polling stations.’ Over 60% of these incidents interrupted voting, with as many as 551 voting stations reporting that fights broke out due to the waits that many had endured and some being unable to find their names on the relevant voting lists. Added to the controversies around the voting records were incidents of ballot box stuffing and loss or theft of many voting machines.
The difficulties were augmented by the fact that many Congolese could not vote at all, because of the violence in the DR-Congo’s north-east. Voters in two territories in North Kivu, namely Rutshuru and Masisi, could not vote due to the instability there and so were shut out of the democratic process altogether. Rebel groups, such as M23 and the Allied Democratic Forces (ADF), continue to operate in the Congo’s north-east, which made the establishment of secure polling booths practically impossible in this region.
Given the tumult that accompanied election day, it cannot be a surprise that opposition leaders hastily demanded a rerun. Martin Fayulu, in particular, called the results a farce. However, it looks very unlikely that the election will be rerun. The Church, despite having noted so many incidents of irregularities, has confirmed the result. As the Church was central to supporting the claim that the votes of 2011 and 2018 were illegitimate, that it has validated the outcome in 2023 likely means that any opposition will be ineffectual. The Supreme Court in the Congo has also ratified 2023’s poll.
Commentators have characterised the election variously as a ‘missed opportunity’ and ‘a halting step towards embedding democracy.’ Despite subtle differences in the characterisation of the election, though, everyone seems to agree that the DRC’s political system remains deeply flawed. If the international community decide not to robustly critique the Congolese elections, which indeed looks likely, the bar has been set astonishingly low in terms of what counts as a legitimate election. And the international community would do well to reflect on this as we head into one of the biggest electoral years in history that will see 4 billion people around the world head to the polls.
Many Congolese will go to the polls again this year to elect governors, vice-governors, mayors, and city counsellors among other positions. It would be worth asking what counts as a free and fair election and to what extent the victors in flawed polls can be counted as legitimate governors and, simultaneously, what can be done about irregularities.
Either way, Félix Tshisekedi’s second term in office has begun in earnest. Yet, as ‘the election campaigns were largely devoid of concrete policy proposals,’ it is unclear what he intends to do in government. There is much that he needs to address, including finding a peaceful resolution to the multifarious crises in the north-east and raising living standards; yet how he will do this is largely unknown to those outside the President’s inner circle.
Hopefully, the provincial and local elections to come will involve more policy detail and be less problematic than the national poll. Whether that is the case remains to be seen.
Dr Reuben Loffman is Senior Lecturer in African History at Queen Mary University of London. His latest book, Church, State and Colonialism in Southeastern Congo, 1890-1962, was published by Palgrave in 2019 and was shortlisted for the Ecclesiastical History Society Book Prize in 2020.