Ivory Coast
Presidential and Legislative Elections, October 31
By Joseph Siegle and Candace Cook
Published October 2020
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A challenge to uphold presidential term limits coupled with unresolved tensions surrounding Côte d’Ivoire’s civil war in 2010 make the 2020 elections a watershed for the country. The outcome of these competing forces will determine whether Côte d’Ivoire continues on the path of political reform and economic growth (which, at 7 percent per year, is among the highest in Africa) or lurches back to a form of unaccountable exclusionary governance that triggered the 2003 and 2010 civil conflicts.
In Summary
The 2020 electoral process in Côte d’Ivoire will be a test of the country’s capacity to assert constraints on the executive.
President Alassane Ouattara, who has led the country’s post-war rejuvenation, completed his second term this year. However, the 78-year-old Ouattara claimed that a new constitution adopted in 2016 has reset the term-limit clock and decided to run for a third term. According to Afrobarometer polling, 86 percent of citizens support a two-term limit in Côte d’Ivoire.
Political map of Côte d’Ivoire
Ouattara has also demonstrated increasingly authoritarian tendencies. Since the start of 2019, there have been 14 arrests of activists and opposition members. Most prominent was the warrant for the arrest of former close ally and leader of the National Assembly, Guillaume Soro, after Soro declared his intention to run in the 2020 elections during a European tour in December 2019. Soro was subsequently forced to divert his flight back to Abidjan to avoid being arrested. The charges against him are widely seen as politically motivated.
Similarly, opposition figure Nathalie Yamb of the Lider party was expelled from Côte d’Ivoire in December 2019 after suggesting France exerted undue influence over the Ouattara government. In October 2019, Jacques Mangoua, a leading figure in the opposition Democratic Party of Côte d’Ivoire–African Democratic Rally (PDCI–RDA), was arrested for allegedly possessing weapons at his home. Subsequently, he was sentenced to 5 years in prison. In January 2019, Alain Lobognan, a parliamentarian close to Soro, was arrested and sentenced to a year in jail and fined about $520 for posting a “fake news tweet.”
Ouattara’s interest in extending his time in power could have been, in part, to fend off an alliance between former presidents Henri Konan Bédié, 81, and Laurent Gbagbo, 75, representing the pre-Ouattara political order, which was preparing to compete for the presidency in 2020. The former leaders’ parties organized a major joint rally in Abidjan in August 2019 despite their lack of common ground. Bédié’s presidency in the late 1990s was marred by accusations of corruption and the invocation of xenophobia under the guise of “Ivorianness.”
Gbagbo, meanwhile, remains in Belgium pending an appeal at the International Criminal Court for crimes against humanity committed during the 2010-2011 electoral crisis sparked when he refused to step down after an electoral loss to Ouattara. The ongoing popularity of these former leaders reveals that ethnic and religious divisions in Côte d’Ivoire remain potent. Bédié and Gbagbo hail from the relatively more prosperous and Christian south, which has traditionally held power in the country to the exclusion of the more rural and largely Muslim north.
These divisions carry over into the security sector. Despite a major security sector reform effort in which nearly 70,000 ex-combatants were demobilized and competing militias integrated into the national army, divided loyalties persist. These tensions were evident in violent mutinies in 2016 and 2017. The prospect that the polarizing politics of the past may return has raised concerns that the reforms of the past 10 years may be undermined.
In short, despite commendable progress since 2010, the 2020 electoral process in Côte d’Ivoire will be a test of the country’s capacity to assert constraints on the executive, as well as of the depth of progress in advancing reconciliation, peacebuilding, and national identity. At stake is Côte d’Ivoire’s reputation as an economic and security anchor in West Africa.
Dr Joseph Siegle is the Director of Research at Africa Center’s research program www.africacenter.org His areas of expertise include democratization, security and development.
Candace Cook is a Research Assistant at Africa Center. She focuses on elections in Africa, good governance and democratic transitions.