Defusing Cameroon’s Dangerous Electoral Standoff ⁰

Protests swept through major cities and towns across Cameroon on 27 October, after electoral authorities declared that incumbent Paul Biya, who has been president for the past 43 years, had won re-election. Official counts gave him 53.66 per cent of the vote, with his main opponent Tchiroma Bakary garnering 35.19 per cent. But the opposition is in an uproar over what it sees as a rigged election. Tally sheets posted from polling stations by civil society groups and opposition parties appear to show Tchiroma prevailing by a convincing margin. With neither side willing to back down, the risks of worsening unrest are high. Thousands have taken to the streets, demanding recognition of the opposition’s apparent victory. Four protesters were killed before the results were issued, and several more after the announcement, while authorities have arrested more than 100 demonstrators (as well as opposition politicians) and warned people not to stage further marches. The dispute threatens to turn ugly in a country already roiled by a separatist rebellion in its Anglophone regions.

Efforts to defuse the standoff are sorely needed, but there are no easy fixes. The African Union (AU) and regional leaders who might have been counted on to intervene have stayed on the sidelines. The opposition does not trust the Constitutional Council, which might otherwise have been expected to find a legal resolution, seeing it as packed with pro-Biya appointees. As protests mount, Biya should quickly initiate a high-level forum mediated by faith leaders, including from the influential Catholic Church and the Muslim community, to discuss a way forward for the country.

Decisions over the next few days will be critical. Cameroonian authorities should avoid attempting to resolve the crisis by force, as they did in past political flare-ups including the last vote in 2018. They should call on state forces not to use lethal force against protesters. All parties should avoid hate speech. In the final instance, only electoral justice, so long as it is conducted fairly and openly, can bring the dispute to a satisfactory, peaceful end. In the absence of a legal route to resolving the crisis, a political settlement is all the more essential.

The Tide Turns against Biya

A number of factors conspired in the 2025 election season to produce the biggest threat to Biya’s long spell in office. The collapse of his traditional electoral coalition in June robbed him of one of his most reliable bastions of support. Opposition leader Tchiroma is from the country’s north. The three populous northern regions in Cameroon’s Sahelian belt, the Far North, North and Adamawa, are home to 40 per cent of total registered voters and had consistently backed Biya in the past. Tchiroma and Bello Bouba Maïgari, both of whom are former government ministers, quit Biya’s ruling coalition earlier in the year, expressing frustration with the authorities’ failure to address the country’s economic and security problems. Across the whole of Cameroon, meanwhile, disenchantment with the way the government has run the country, including what the Catholic Church described as a pattern of ethnic exclusion and misappropriation of resources, prompted a swing toward the opposition.

But perhaps the most important cause of the shift in public opinion was fatigue with Biya’s rule. At 92, he is the world’s oldest national leader – though he presides over a country where the median age is eighteen. The majority of Cameroonians, in fact, have known no other president. Many, including some in his own coalition, had hoped he would step down ahead of the vote. His July announcement that he would seek re-election, despite his evident incapacity to conduct a campaign (he appeared at only one rally), appears to have loosed a tidal wave of support for his opponents.

Voting on 12 October unfolded mostly peacefully, but tensions rose in the aftermath of the polls. Following the election, Tchiroma, civil society activists and members of the public posted online publicly accessible tally sheets showing that the opposition had coasted to a crushing victory. Three presidential candidates quickly recognised Tchiroma’s triumph. Tchiroma himself published his own tallies online, with polling station details. The government and electoral commission, for their part, maintained a studious silence until the announcement of the results on 27 October, though official figures crowning Biya the victor leaked online.

Demonstrations by opposition supporters drew a forceful response from the police, though in some towns state forces opted not to get involved. On 22 October, anti-riot gendarmes shot and killed a woman teacher who was returning from work at a primary school in the northern city of Garoua as they confronted protesters with live fire and tear gas. Protests in towns in the Far North, such as Mora, Kousseri and Maroua, have drawn thousands of participants. The Union for Change, the civil society-political party coalition which backed Tchiroma, called on Cameroonians to stay home on 24 October, in essence declaring a public holiday to celebrate what they believed was the outcome. Heeding a call from Tchiroma, thousands rallied nationwide on 26 October.

Once the Constitutional Council announced the official tallies, protesters took to the streets to vent their anger at what they called a fixed election. Tchiroma posted on Facebook that two supporters were killed outside his home. Television footage showed snipers stationed on rooftops near Tchiroma’s home, where people have massed to protect him from arrest. Scenes of police responding with live fire and mounting reports of deaths have fuelled public outrage, particularly in the economic capital Douala. Schools and businesses have shut down in Douala, Garoua, Bafang and many towns in the north, and protesters plan to ratchet up the pressure in the run-up to Biya’s planned inauguration in early November.

The Battle over Results

The opposition is determined to pursue its claim of victory. Along with civil society observers, it points to what it describes as implausible features of the official results. Electoral authorities reported turnout in rural parts of the conflict-wracked Anglophone regions at up to 80 per cent, with most of the votes going to Biya – even though separatists had imposed a six-week lockdown to obstruct voting. This reported participation rate marked an unexpectedly large jump to 46 per cent from the roughly 9 per cent recorded in the 2018 elections, and in a region where Biya is unpopular, half a million people have been displaced by conflict and new voter enrolment was the lowest in the country. The official results appear even more surprising in light of the fact that Tchiroma generated support in these areas by promising to release Anglophone leaders, end the war through negotiations and introduce federalism.

The drawn-out process of announcing the results only deepened suspicions of foul play. Polls closed at 6pm on 12 October, and by most accounts, including the government’s, the vote ended without major incident. By 8pm, almost all counts had been completed, which explains why tally sheets from polling stations and videos announcing local results flooded the internet the same night. It then appears to have taken the counting commissions an additional ten days to hand over results to the Constitutional Council. During this tense wait, citizens compared the lag time to other countries on the continent, where results are typically released between 24 to 72 hours after the vote. The opposition claimed that authorities were putting pressure on election commission officials to alter the outcome.

This electoral dust-up is not the first in the country’s contemporary history. In 2018, the main opposition candidate Maurice Kamto also claimed to have secured victory. Post-election protests – smaller than today’s – were then quashed by the authorities. But Biya found himself in a much stronger position at the time, in command of a broad electoral coalition and in firm control of state institutions. Moreover, unlike in this election, Biya’s support base in the north remained intact in 2018, meaning that the odds favoured the incumbent.

Dangers on the Horizon

As government and opposition proclaim starkly different election outcomes, the prospects for Cameroon are alarming. Intensifying protests and an ever more violent state response pose immediate dangers. Authorities have veered between repression and restraint, arresting opposition figures while also making calls for peace through state officials and traditional rulers. The clampdown since the proclamation of results on 27 October has nevertheless become markedly harsher.

Following a spate of putsches in West Africa, the Biya government has been worried for some time that it might be toppled in a coup. Biya reshuffled the military’s upper ranks in September 2023, after the son of his long-time peer and former president of neighbouring Gabon, Ali Bongo, was overthrown. He rang the changes again in October 2024, hours after returning to the country following a 51-day sojourn at a luxurious Geneva hotel marked by feverish rumours of his demise. Biya will be watching how the army, which so far has mostly stayed out of the streets and left the protests to be handled by the police, responds if the marches grow even bigger. A coup cannot be ruled out, but nor can schisms in the armed forces that such an upheaval could trigger, given how Biya has positioned loyalists throughout the top brass. Splinters could arise along ethno-political lines, with soldiers in parts of the country that overwhelmingly supported Biya defying any attempt at a military takeover.

Ethnic polarisation is also a threat outside the army’s confines. Some Biya-supporting administrators have already depicted the clamour for the incumbent to stand down as an effort by Nordistes (people from the three northern regions), Anglophones (people from the North West and South West, somewhat paradoxically given Biya’s official landslide win there) and Bamilekes (people from the Francophone West) – areas where opposition to Biya is strongest – to grab the power concentrated in the president’s strongholds in the South, East and parts of the Centre. A prolonged crisis could see further efforts to widen ethnic fissures.

The Anglophone regions have been mostly calm since the election, but violence could flare again. A month before polling, pro-independence militias attacked and killed nine government soldiers. Rebels in the North West and South West regions could target officials and others who were associated with the election in defiance of their lockdown. A day after the poll, they kidnapped a ruling-party parliamentarian in the North West, executing him three days later. Residents fear further deadly violence, given the separatists’ anger at what they see as inflated voting figures favouring Biya. Though separatists boycotted the election, depicting theirs as a principled stance given their support for Anglophone regional autonomy, many of them openly wished for a Tchiroma win, seeing an opposition victory as more likely to pave the way for talks aimed at settling the years-long insurgency.

Calming the Waters

Cameroon is at a crossroads. Had Biya and his entourage exercised more care in the months before the vote and understood the depth of the government’s unpopularity, this standoff might have been averted. As Crisis Group argued in a pre-election briefing, steps to build faith in the process, such as releasing political prisoners who have languished in jail for years (some of them detained after the 2018 electoral protests) and according more independence to electoral institutions, whose leaders are appointed by the president, might have helped defuse tensions and curb expectations that the election would be fixed.

There are no good options on the table now, but Cameroonian authorities should urgently try to temper the conflict that is brewing. Biya would be 99 at the end of another full term, and by dint of biology he will sooner or later approach the twilight of his time in office. Those around him should recognise the risks to their own future of attempting a bloody crackdown on the opposition, which could prompt political or judicial retribution when Biya’s hold on power eventually ends. The president should order the release of jailed opposition figures, while security chiefs should direct the police and army not to fire into crowds of protesters. Actions like these will only inflame demonstrations, as seen in youth-led movements elsewhere. If protests grow larger and more widespread, those with Biya’s ear, including partners in Chad and Nigeria and the former colonial power France, which has close connections to key Cameroonian elites, should urge the authorities to back down rather than attempt to quell protests by force.

Mediating between the two sides is likely to pose an array of challenges. Ideally, the Constitutional Council, which handles electoral disputes, should have ordered an investigation into the vote tally as a way to close the book on this dispute. But, as noted earlier, members of this institution are appointed by Biya and are widely regarded as biased toward the ruling party. In years past, the AU and leaders of neighbouring countries would have been expected to step in to broker an understanding between the parties. Due partly to the AU’s own lethargy and partly to Cameroon’s years of diplomatic efforts to keep both the bloc and the UN from meddling in the country’s internal frictions, no such intervention appears to be under way – even if the effort would still be worthwhile.

In these circumstances, some sort of domestic mediation represents one of the few viable alternatives. Biya could seek to curb the disaffection of many Cameroonians and the threats to the country’s peace and stability by calling for a high-level forum mediated by religious leaders to negotiate a way out of the impasse. The aim should be not only to guide the parties to a compromise that saves the country from tipping into chaos but also to weigh Cameroon’s political future. For its part, opposition leaders should call on supporters to avoid violence and hate speech – as should Biya’s side. The European Union, the AU and the UN should lend their voices to these calls by directly appealing to Biya to address the turmoil through consensual rather than coercive means.

It is a perilous moment for Cameroon. Strained by internal conflict while its Central African neighbours grapple with acute security and humanitarian crises, the country has previously managed to stave off the biggest threats to its stability, in part due to Biya’s management of competing ethno-political blocs in the ruling party. Instead of exporting trouble, the country has become a strategic logistics partner for international actors aiming to support nearby conflict-scarred states. This electoral dispute, however, threatens to undo Cameroon’s standing as a backbone of peace and security. National politicians and influential faith leaders, with the support of foreign states and bodies, including the UN, France and the EU as well as neighbouring Chad and Nigeria, should act swiftly and decisively to resolve the dispute before it inflames the conflicts in the Anglophone regions or the Far North – or plunges the whole country into political mayhem.

Culled from the International Crisis Group