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Today in Chad, a central African country currently governed by a military junta, more than eight million people will vote to elect a new president. According to the announcements made by the military, the elections were supposed to complete a process of transition towards a democratic system, but there are great doubts that this will ultimately be the case. Before the vote, the military had in fact violently repressed the opposition and had excluded their main candidates from the electoral lists. The two politicians who will compete for the presidency are General Mahamat Idriss Déby, head of the military junta who would now like to legitimize the power acquired unconstitutionally in 2021, and his prime minister Succès Masra.
If no candidate is elected in the first round, the results of which will be officially announced on May 21st, there will be a run-off scheduled for June 22nd.
General Mahamat Idriss Déby is the son of Idriss Déby Itno, the former president of the country killed in April 2021 in unclear circumstances the day after a presidential election which confirmed him for the umpteenth time at the helm of Chad with almost 80 percent of the votes. His son, who had taken his place thanks to the support of the army and ignoring the line of succession indicated by the Chadian Constitution, had dissolved parliament, suspended the Constitution and promised to lead a transitional government for 18 months, until new elections . Since then, however, he had adopted a series of measures to delay the vote until 2024, as well as some measures that had allowed him to run.
A few months after the inauguration of Mahamat Idriss Déby, there had been large protests throughout Chad and between 73 and 300 demonstrators, depending on the numbers communicated by the military junta and some international non-governmental organizations, had been killed by forces safety.
Protests against the military junta, N’Djamena, Chad, October 20, 2022 (AP Photo)
Over time, and with the postponement of the elections, the arrests, intimidation and threats towards opposition politicians and protesters had not stopped. On February 28, 2024, Yaya Dillo, one of the main opposition leaders and cousin of Mahamat Idriss Déby, was killed along with 12 other people during an army attack on his party headquarters. A few days later Mahamat Idriss Déby announced his candidacy for the presidential elections.
During the election campaign, Mahamat Idriss Déby said several times that he had saved Chad from chaos by taking power in 2021 and that he had worked to restore peace and stability. Officially he is the candidate of a coalition of over 200 parties, but it is a single political force that establishes the line to follow, the Nationalist and right-wing Movement for Patriotic Salvation (MPS), of which he is part and which was founded by father in the nineties.
The main rival of the transitional president is Prime Minister Succès Masra. Once in opposition and returned to Chad on 3 November 2023 after a year of exile, on 1 January 2024 he was appointed head of government following a political agreement reached with the military junta and highly criticized by his former allies and supporters.
Two opposing theories are circulating regarding Masra’s candidacy: the opposition and part of civil society consider him a fake candidate to give the illusion that the presidential elections, which are expected to be won by Mahamat Idriss Déby, will be more competitive, but above all democratic. Rakhis Ahmat Saleh, an opposition candidate excluded from the presidential elections by Chad’s Constitutional Council, told the French news agency AFP that Masra is a supporter of Mahamat Idriss Déby and that he is raising the stakes “simply to secure his place after Déby’s election”.
According to others, Masra’s fake presence instead transformed over time into a real candidacy: galvanized by the crowds who flocked to attend his electoral meetings, especially in the south of the country, at a certain point in the electoral campaign Masra in fact took on a much more decided against Mahamat Idriss Déby, multiplying attacks and criticisms against him.
Masra promised his supporters a victory in the first round, but also invited them to monitor the vote, suggesting that fraud could occur during the counting. In turn, and three days before the vote, some Chadian associations that work for the promotion of human rights have said they are worried about an election that seems “neither credible, free nor democratic”. The National Electoral Agency (Ange) reacted to the accusations by publishing numerous press releases and warning those who take photos of the polling minutes to preserve any evidence of the results that they may be punished.
Among the other candidates, ten in total, it is worth mentioning the former prime minister Albert Pahimi Padacké, who came second in the 2021 presidential elections with over 10 percent of the votes: he could therefore be decisive in the event of a run-off.
It is unclear what will happen once the results of the first round are announced, but there are fears that new protests could begin and resulting violent crackdowns. As he wrote for example Le Monde, it is not clear what Masra will do if the results do not match his expectations: whether he will incite new violence or favor peace. Masra said he was certain that the army, which since the country’s independence has never hesitated to take power in times of political uncertainty, “will side with the winner.”
Chad is considered an ally of the West, especially of France – from which it gained independence in 1960 – and of the United States, and has contributed in many circumstances to counter-terrorism actions in the Sahel region and in Nigeria against the Islamist group Boko Haram.
– Read also: France’s frustrated ambitions in West Africa
