Guinea’s Call to Elections Exposes Military Bid to Cling to Power

Guinea has announced that it will hold presidential elections on 28 December, formally bringing an end to its four-year military-run transition. But the conditions that gave rise to the September 2021 coup remain intact, and transitional leader General Mamadi Doumbouya appears intent on running as a candidate. In the lead-up to the proclamation of the electoral calendar on 27 September, the government suspended the two largest opposition parties and pushed through constitutional changes allowing Doumbouya to stand, despite his earlier pledge not to. 

The Guinean government’s moves risk deepening political divisions. Doumbouya and his allies seized power in a coup that earned popular acclaim amid widespread disquiet over former president Alpha Condé’s decision to change the constitution so as to allow himself to run for a third term in 2020. The former president responded to a wave of public opposition with arrests and other repressive measures. 

His power grab set the stage for the coup. General Doumbouya came to power criticising “the instrumentalisation of justice [and] the trampling of citizen’s rights” under Condé. But the general’s government has not calmed the country’s sometimes violent and volatile politics or found a solution to divisions and rivalries in the armed forces. In June 2024, the former chief of staff of the armed forces and onetime junta heavyweight, General Sadiba Koulibaly, died in detention days after being convicted of desertion for allegedly abandoning his post at the Guinean embassy in Cuba. 

Now, Doumbouya appears to be following in Condé’s footsteps by seeking an electoral mandate after pushing through constitutional changes. Though he has not yet announced his candidacy for the upcoming polls, government officials have been informally campaigning on Doumbouya’s behalf for months. The Charter of the Transition, which served as Guinea’s constitution after the coup, barred him from running in the next election. But on 21 September, the transitional government held a referendum for a new constitution which lifted that restriction, among other things. The constitution passed with 89 per cent of the vote on an 86 per cent turnout. 

Victory in the referendum was due in no small part to the government’s crackdown against political opponents and civil society. In August, the authorities suspended the country’s two biggest political parties, the Union of Democratic Forces of Guinea and the Rally of the Guinean People, ostensibly for failing to respect certain administrative regulations. The leaders of both, respectively former prime minister Cellou Dalein Diallo and former president Condé, are in exile. The government has banned protests since 2022, and civil society groups documented over 50 deaths of protesters between September 2021 and December 2024.  

By repeating Condé’s strategy – remaining in office at all costs and mobilising the power of the state to undermine the opposition and civil society – Guinea’s new leaders run the risk of winding up like him: at the top but with waning legitimacy and facing the threat of a coup from within the still-divided military.