In May 2024, Chadian voters went to the polls to elect their president in an election that was not recognized as fully free or fair by the international community. Chadians will again head to the polls on 29 December 2024 for the National Assembly elections. The election will be the first time in 13 years that the body, whose term is officially limited to four years, will face an election by the Chadian electorate. It will be the fourth time in the history of independent Chad — which gained its independence in 1960 — that multiple parties will be allowed to compete in legislative polls. In addition to parliamentary elections, Chad will conduct provincial and local elections simultaneously.
Due to the government’s heavy-handedness and numerous institutional advantages, these elections are not expected to be free or fair.
Background
Chad has historically been a country plagued by violence and civil strife. The ruling Patriotic Salvation Movement (MPS,*) first came to power in 1990 after a coup against the previous Chadian government. In 2005-2010, the country was engulfed in a civil war that pitted various rebel groups against the MPS government. With intervention from Libya, France, and neighboring Sudan, the war became a proxy conflict — one out of which the incumbent MPS leader at the time Idriss Déby eventually came out on top.
The MPS is not a traditional political party in that its roots are personal and clientelist, owing much to the tribal and ethnic links that exist within the MPS structure. In 2021, Déby was killed while commanding Chadian forces against an anti-government rebel group known as the Front for Change and Concord or FACT. Immediately after his death, the military launched a coup, dissolving the parliament and placing the country under a military-led transitional government with Déby’s son — Mahamat Déby — at its head.
When the transition that was supposed to have been completed by the end of 2022 was extended for two more years, demonstrations broke out in which security forces beat dozens of demonstrators. This was condemned by Amnesty International as a disproportionate use of force, forcing opposition politicians like Succès Masra to flee abroad. The killing of Yaya Dillo, an opposition leader and a relative of Déby, in February 2024 further contributed to the atmosphere of repression that the military government sustained. The transitional government officially ended with Mahamat Déby being formally elected as president in May 2024.
Electoral System
In the parliamentary elections, Chad uses a mixed electoral system to elect its 188 deputies. The country is divided into single and multi-member constituencies. Constituencies with only one seat are won through the two-round system where candidates need a majority to win outright. If no candidate wins a majority, the election in these constituencies goes to a second round with the top two candidates contesting. Multi-member constituencies are separately elected through a modified form of proportional representation. If a party list wins over 50% of the vote in one of these districts, that list gets all the seats. If no list gets at least 50%, the seats are awarded by proportional representation using the largest remainder method.
This system effectively encourages parties to ally together on joint lists where they believe they will have the greatest chance at winning an outright majority in the contested district. In the 2011 election, the MPS allied itself with the Rally for Democracy and Progress (RDP, centre-right) and Viva-National Rally for Development and Progress (Viva-RNDP, centre) and occasionally included all three parties on a joint list. Similar to MPS, neither the RDP nor Viva-RNDP advocated for specific policy proposals and are linked together by a generally vague commitment to “development” and ensuring “national unity.”
Provincial councils meanwhile are set to be elected on a department basis, with each department entitled to send three councilors to the regional councils.
Media Landscape
According to RSF’s World Press Freedom Index in 2024, Chad’s media landscape is in a “difficult” situation and is ranked 96th out of 180 countries surveyed. According to the BBC, radio is the main source of information for Chadians living outside the capital, N’Djamena. Though recent years have shown an increase in the number of privately owned media, the government-owned radio and TV stations Radio Tchad and Tele Tchad respectively are the only networks with truly nationwide coverage. Although Chad has a comparatively vibrant print media in comparison to the government’s domination of networked media, only about 28% of the population above the age of 15 is literate — rates which are substantially lower in the rural departments and serve to confine readership to the more urban areas like the capital. Social media usage has increased over the past few years, notably in the 2024 presidential election, but only 22.5% of Chadians currently have internet access.
Though independent media in theory have a wide scope of action, material that is critical of the Chadian government has met with reprisal. Outlets such as Alwihda Info, in 2023, have faced arbitrary detentions of journalists and operational shutdowns. In the case of Alwihda, this has been in response to pieces deemed too far out of line with what authorities consider acceptable reporting.
The Opposition
The Chadian opposition is highly fragmented, with over 100 registered parties contesting the last parliamentary election. According to the national electoral agency ANGE, there will be 179 parties contesting the parliamentary elections this time around.
There are four major opposition parties generally considered to be left-of-centre as tracked by Africa Elects. Two of these parties, the Party for Liberties and Development (PLD) and the National Union for Democracy and Renewal (UNDR), joined forces in the 2011 election on a joint list. Together, they won 12 out of 188 seats available, making them the second-largest bloc in the National Assembly. However, during the transition period, the UNDR leader Saleh Kebzabo was briefly prime minister, and his party did not field a candidate in the 2024 presidential election. The PLD differs from the UNDR in that it is a party representing Muslim interests.
A third, RNDT-Le Reveil had previously cooperated with the MPS in government before Idriss Déby’s death. On the presidential level, they have been among the most successful opposition parties. Under the leadership of Albert Pahimi Padacke, the party has consistently come in second or third place in every presidential election since 2006, besides 2016 in which they did not field a candidate, with their strongest performance occurring in 2024.
The fourth, the Union for Renewal and Democracy (URD), is generally regarded as the most critical opposition party of the four and is described by Africa Elects as being “anti-nepotism.” Since 1997, the URD has the record of having won the most seats of any opposition party in a legislative election, having won 29 out of 125 seats in the National Assembly that year. These elections were held under the two-round, majoritarian system for election rather than the current hybrid party-bloc vote system.
The other two opposition parties of note are the Les Transformateurs (LT, liberal) and the federalist Federation, Action for the Republic (FAR, federalist) parties. Les Transformateurs was founded by former transition prime minister and runner-up presidential candidate Succés Masra. Masra had been widely regarded as the main challenger to Mahamat Déby’s candidacy even as he held the post of prime minister, leading some to question his opposition credibility. This is similar to the situation with Kebzabo in the run-up to the election.
Over a dozen different parties contesting the 2011 parliamentary polls won only one seat. This spoke magnitudes both to the fragmentation of the country’s opposition, but also to the MPS support base. The ability of these minor parties to win seats suggests that the larger, multi-member constituencies are attributed more proportionally than the smaller departments, meaning that the MPS coalition did not win a majority of the vote in many of these constituencies. To make up for this, MPS would have had to sweep the single member and smaller departments in the countryside in order to maintain the majority it had in parliament after 2011.
Opposition Boycott
In mid-October, it was announced that fifteen of Chad’s smaller opposition parties would be boycotting the December polls, citing the lack of a democratic climate. Most of these parties were not included in the post-coup transition process. However, on 21 October, Succés Masra announced that his party, Les Transformateurs, planned to participate in the opposition boycott.
The inclusion of what is arguably Chad’s most popular opposition party comes as a major boost for the other fifteen that initially announced the boycott. The last election with turnout data for a parliamentary election was in 2002, at about 52%. Though, with Les Transformateurs no longer contesting the parliamentary election, the result of the December poll is in even less doubt than it would have been otherwise.
At this point, it’s unclear how many of Chad’s “legacy” opposition parties — that is, parties that won more than 2 seats in parliament in 2011— will join the boycott. There are few signs pointing in this direction. Participation among the main opposition parties has been sporadic at times with groups like the FAR and the PLD choosing to boycott some, but not all elections.
Conclusion
Due to the planned boycott, anything less than a sweeping victory for the MPS-led coalition is highly unlikely. Even without the Les Transformateurs-led boycott, the electoral system and Chad’s fragmented opposition alone would probably have been enough for a sweeping MPS victory. The ultimate goal of the boycott is to put pressure on the Déby government in the wake of Déby’s decision in September 2024 to allow US forces to remain in the country. Though Mahamat Déby has insisted that he intends to chart an independent foreign policy, the reality is that Western countries, like France and the United States, are some of Chad’s most reliable security partners. If successful, the boycott could draw the attention of the West to these elections and even alter the dynamics of the US and France’s relationships with the Chadian government.