Has Tanzania Reached Its Breaking Point?

President Hassan sought to strongarm the country’s election, meting out repression, violence, and arrests to anyone who dares challenge her. Tanzanians have seen enough.

By Dan Paget

October 2025

Tanzania is in flames. Protests erupted across a number of cities on October 29, as the country’s general election got underway. The government has responded with force. Police and military personnel have fired guns and launched teargas. Multiple deaths have been reported.

The protests broke out in response to the government’s attempt to strong arm the country’s national election. In the run-up to the vote, incumbent president Samia Suluhu Hassan had her two principal opponents excluded from the ballot: ACT-Wazalendo’s Luhaga Mpina, who had been disqualified from the race twice at the behest of government officials, and Tundu Lissu, leader of Chadema, the country’s main opposition party. Lissu is currently standing trial for treason.

Hassan’s regime has not merely set the opposition at a disadvantage; it has all but closed the window for electoral competition. With the exclusion of the leading opposition candidates, Hassan romped to a hollow victory against the sixteen remaining, relatively minor candidates. Her Chama Cha Mapinduzi (CCM) party will likely also retain its overwhelming majority in the country’s 393-member parliament.

This is all a far cry from the 2015 presidential election, in which Chadema’s candidate, Edward Lowassa, overcame a series of electoral disadvantages to come in a strong second, with 40 percent of the vote, to the CCM’s John Pombe Magufuli. The regime’s actions amount to an attempt to consolidate a return to authoritarian rule that has been in progress since 2014. The protests signal Tanzanians’ rejection of their country’s descent into authoritarianism.

The demonstrations have taken place across a string of neighborhoods in Dar es Salaam, Tanzania’s largest city. More have reportedly broken out in Mwanza, Dodoma, Mbeya, and a number of cities and towns besides. Protesters have ransacked polling stations, set police stations ablaze, and torn down posters of Hassan and her party. Chants of “We do not want CCM,” have reportedly rung out amid the demonstrations. And online activists have been popularizing a new nickname for Hassan: Idi Amin Mama, in allusion to Idi Amin Dada, the notorious Ugandan military dictator of the 1970s. The government imposed a curfew on election day, but protests continued in defiance.

Eliminating the Competition

In the election campaign itself, the CCM regime left nothing to chance. Lissu was arrested on April 9 and subsequently charged with treason. His trial was then repeatedly postponed. Given that treason is a nonbailable offence, Lissu has been held in remand. Elected chairman of Chadema on January 22 this year, the opposition leader had spearheaded a campaign of civil disobedience demanding constitutional reform under the banner “No Reform, No Elections.” The prosecution alleges that the statements Lissu made as part of this campaign were intended to intimidate the government, and that under the Penal Code such acts constitute treason.

This is not the first time that Lissu has been arrested. He has been detained on numerous other occasions, including for sedition, and in 2017 he survived an assassination attempt in which he was shot sixteen times.

Lissu’s trial eliminated one challenger to Hassan, as well as to the state. But another remained: Luhaga Mpina, a recent CCM defector who became ACT-Wazalendo’s presidential candidate. ACT-Wazalendo is the second-largest opposition party in Tanzania and has strongholds in Zanzibar and the northwest region of Kigoma. But on August 26, the Registrar of Political Parties, a presidential appointee, nullified Mpina’s candidacy on procedural grounds. Mpina then took the matter to the High Court and won on September 13. Two days later, however, the ostensibly independent electoral commission nullified his candidacy again, this time at the direction of the attorney-general.

With both Lissu and Mpina out of the way, Hassan has run for the presidency free of challenges and competition from her principal opponents. Chadema, the leading opposition party, has been banned from participating in elections due to its refusal to sign an ethics code after Lissu’s arrest. A separate injunction issued by the High Court temporarily barred Chadema’s leaders from participating in political activities and using party resources until a frivolous case from a former party official was heard.

Repression, Torture, and Abductions

Alongside these formal exclusions from electoral competition, Hassan’s regime has increased the intensity of everyday repression. Protests have not been tolerated, police brutality against protesters has become the norm, and the pace at which activists are arrested has accelerated. After a Chadema-led protest in August 2024, more than 500 were arrested.

In parallel, covert state violence has intensified. Activists have been herded into the backs of vans, tortured, and then dumped on roadsides. This happened to activist Maria Tsehai — not in Tanzania but in Kenya, where she had already fled. Not all victims have survived. On 6 September 2024, Chadema official Ali Kibao was taken away in the dead of night, tortured, disfigured, and murdered. A growing list of opposition-aligned activists have also been abducted. Chadema deputy chairman John Heche has been detained since October 22. Even ruling-party members are not safe from such treatment if they dare to question the regime. High-ranking CCM politician and former ambassador Humphrey Polepole, for example, was forcibly disappeared on October 6. His whereabouts remain unknown.

The regime has also reasserted its control over means of communication, imposing running bans on the social media-platforms X, Clubhouse, and Telegram as well as the popular Tanzanian website JamiiForums.

Taken together, these actions amount to the elimination of true electoral competition in Tanzania. Political parties may vie for individual parliamentary seats, but they may not challenge the CCM’s position nationwide.

The Legacy of Single-Party Rule

Of course, authoritarianism is not new to Tanzania. It has deep roots. This year marks the sixtieth anniversary of the formal installment of a one-party system of government in the country, both on the mainland and in the semi-autonomous archipelago of Zanzibar. The same parties that were in power then, which merged in 1977 to form CCM, still rule Tanzania today, making CCM the longest-ruling party in Africa. Although the country introduced multiparty elections in 1992, the regime controlled the process and preserved much of its authoritarian infrastructure. The party has continued to build on that foundation, especially since 2014.

Yet for all this continuity, there has been change. Chadema has found innovative ways to build support and strength despite the ruling party’s many advantages. Chadema’s people-power philosophy and its incendiary campaign against elite state capture, encapsulated in the “List of Shame” it published in 2007, brought increasing public support to its side. Chadema’s strong showing in the 2015 elections marked its maturation into a party capable of winning power nationwide.

The rise of Chadema is a key part of the context in which CCM changed course. Beginning in 2014, and gathering steam under the presidency of John Magufuli (2015–21), who was elected the following year, Tanzania began to take an authoritarian turn. The CCM passed laws to control journalists, media, political parties, social media, and NGOs. Magufuli issued presidential orders banning opposition rallies and shutting down newspapers. This period was also marked by police brutality, political prosecutions, covert violence, and abductions. In the 2019 local elections, the ruling party won 99 percent of the vote by disqualifying opposition candidates en masse. And in 2020, it secured 84 percent of the vote in the presidential contest and 93 percent of the seats in the National Assembly in elections that were apparently rigged at scale.

Crossing Red Lines

By the time of Magufuli’s death in office in March 2021, the CCM regime had already crossed a key threshold. It had gone beyond competitive authoritarianism and simply using autocratic means to tip the electoral playing field in its favor. As I argued at the time, it had in effect eliminated electoral competition altogether and quelled internal dissent almost completely. In academic parlance, it had become a hegemonic electoral autocracy.

Under Hassan, the regime has consolidated that hegemonic electoral autocracy. She has not, as Magufuli did, banned teenage mothers from attending school, ostentatiously denied the science of covid, or cooked up any outlandish conspiracy theories. On the contrary, she has, in some ways, been the very model of a neoliberal president: procedural, technocratic, considered, and business friendly. But she has crossed redlines that Magufuli never did.

He eliminated electoral competition in all but name, through election rigging and repression and a hundred other means. Yet he never put his opponents on trial for treason or terrorism. He never banned presidential candidates from running against him (though he certainly had parliamentary and local councilor candidates disqualified, at times in the thousands). Hassan has done all this, crossing autocratic threshold after autocratic threshold and in the process consolidating the nearly closed authoritarian system that Magufuli created.

Whither Hassan the Reformer?

Hassan’s sharp turn into authoritarianism is a major departure from the path that she implied she would take when first assuming the presidency in 2021. While promising to honor Magafuli’s legacy, she signaled that she would implement a program of democratic reforms. And she quickly delivered the first of them by lifting the ban on media houses. She followed that up by releasing political prisoners, lifting prohibitions on opposition rallies, and extending olive branches to her opponents.

But, as many anticipated, these reforms turned out not to be the first installments of a broader program. Instead, the very media organizations that she unbanned are now being banned again alongside others. The long-promised program of constitutional reform has turned out to be nothing more than a smokescreen to win Hassan temporary favor with citizens and Western donors she was hoping to woo. As I argued in a recent Journal of Democracy essay, she was not delivering reform. She was just performing it.

Most audaciously, she seems determined to stay that course. Hers is a respectable authoritarianism. Her preference for lawfare dovetails nicely with her taste for procedure and her patrician manners. She is more Paul Kagame of Rwanda than Magufuli of Tanzania: She preaches the importance of democracy while overseeing the prosecution or disappearance of her enemies. Lissu’s trial, in her painting of it, is a matter of law enforcement, not politics. Mpina’s disqualification is a question of proper administration, not election rigging.

Breaking Point

The protests taking place now are without precedent in mainland Tanzania since the reintroduction of multiparty elections 33 years ago. Despite the steady reentrenchment of autocracy in recent years, widespread protests have not materialized until now. This is not for want of trying. On the contrary, Tanzania’s opposition has sought for years to bring its supporters out into the streets at scale, but has failed to do so beyond a small body of committed activists.

In the wake of apparent large-scale election rigging in 2020, Chadema called for mass protests, but this call went largely unheeded. The public may have been cowed by the heavy police and military presence on the streets. People may also have remembered the nationwide protests that Chadema had promised and then retreated from in 2016, or the fate of Akwilina Akwilline, a student on a bus who was killed by a stray bullet during a rare Chadema-led protest in 2018.

In this election, a groundswell of Tanzanians have apparently reached their breaking point, turning out to protest the regime in spite of the dangers that entails. Why now? This has everything to do with the autocratic red lines that Hassan has so brazenly crossed as well as the substance of her political project. Whereas Magufuli had won some popular support for his performed fight against corruption and imperialism, Hassan has come to embody the status quo with her embrace of the CCM establishment and her government’s unpopular moves—for example, levying a tax on mobile money transactions and signing a seemingly shady port deal with a Dubai-based logistics firm.

A Moment of Uncertainty

The protests that are rocking Tanzania throw its trajectory into doubt. Neighboring Kenya has modeled how protests can not only scale-up but give birth to a movement. Tanzania appears to be on the brink of just such a moment. This, of course, brings into question the viability of the regime altogether—particularly given as-yet unsubstantiated rumors that military personnel were protecting protesters. In such moments, regimes become unstable.

Even assuming that the CCM regime eventually succeeds in repressing the protests, the viability of Hassan’s reform kabuki will be thrown into doubt. On the one hand, the depths of popular dissatisfaction, and the brutality of the crackdown already underway are hard to square with her claims of being a democrat. Yet Hassan has shown that she is happy to lean into the contradictions of performing reform while practicing autocracy. Tanzania’s democracy, in her telling, is a civil and disciplined one, where the law comes before protest, administrative procedure before political rights, and decency before dissent. Respectability and civility are the nooses with which she strangles her opponents.

Whatever the immediate future holds, the protests unfolding in Tanzania are the latest signs that Tanzanian demands to control their own futures will not be easily repressed. Though Magufuli had essentially bulldozed Chadema’s organization during his presidency, the party rebuilt itself after his death. Similarly, after the regime coopted the liberal Civic United Front party in 2017, its members decamped en masse to ACT-Wazalendo. The country’s democratic activists have suffered greatly at the hands of the regime over the years — their scars are deep and their sacrifices many. The protests are the latest illustration that these champions, in all their forms, keep bouncing back.

Dan Paget is assistant professor of politics at the University of Sussex.

Copyright © 2025 National Endowment for Democracy

Image credit: ERICKY BONIPHACE/AFP via Getty Images