Cameroon’s Election Casts a Long Shadow

Cameroonians just reelected the 92-year-old Paul Biya in an election that voters rightly view with suspicion. The tensions under the surface don’t bode well for the country or its people.

By Christopher Fomunyoh

November 2025

On 12 October 2025, the Central African country of Cameroon held a presidential election, the outcome of which now pushes its more than thirty-million inhabitants toward wide-scale violence and contestation, extreme polarization, and a potential long-term dislocation of the state. The race turned out to be more hotly contested than some observers had expected — especially ruling-party elites, some of whom have been at the helm of Cameroonian politics since the country gained independence in 1960. But in the end, 92-year-old Paul Biya, who has been president since 1982, was once again proclaimed the winner.

Although a sizeable number of Cameroon’s eight-million-plus registered voters cast ballots peacefully on election day, the vote-tabulation process gave rise to suspicions that vote totals had been tampered with or manipulated to favor Biya to the detriment of his main competitor and former government minister, Issa Tchiroma. That it took the Constitutional Council the full fifteen days allowed by the country’s election law to officially pronounce the results added to Cameroonians’ anxiety and to suspicions of electoral fraud. The multiple layers of vote aggregation adopted decades ago — polling-station tallies are transmitted up through three separate commissions before they finally reach the Constitutional Council for validation and declaration of the winner — appear totally archaic in this age of modern technology that, in other countries, allows for rapid and real-time transmission of election data.

Elections are a cornerstone of governance whose conduct provides a window into the vitality of the other pillars, such as state-society relations, the separation of powers, and functionality of legislatures, judiciaries, and independent entities including political parties, security services, and civil society. The conduct of this year’s polls and handling of the postelection crisis exposed undeniable flaws and weaknesses in Cameroonian society, and are tearing through the veil of cosmetic democratic experimentation that the current regime has shielded itself with for more than four decades.

Unfortunately, citizens’ current suspicions are warranted because of controversies around previous presidential polls — notably, in 1992 and 2018, when opposition parties claimed victory at the ballot box, though their claims lacked hard proof. Learning from those experiences, today’s opposition parties and civil society set up various platforms to independently collate and tabulate election results across the country, based on tally sheets, and publicly announced vote totals from polling sites.

The controversy at hand is that the figures put forward by the opposition and civil society show a clear victory for Tchiroma, in sharp contrast to the Constitutional Council’s official pronouncement which ruling-party members and staunch Biya supporters have embraced. The stakes are high, the binary choice is stark, and tensions are already at a fever pitch in a country whose diversity comprises other fault lines that can easily be exacerbated by political and election-related conflict. For many Cameroonians and keen observers of the country’s politics, the swearing-in of Paul Biya on November 6 was the epitome of a pyrrhic victory, a missed opportunity for the peaceful transfer of power and yet another harbinger of real challenges to come.

Elections, Parties, the Gerontocracy, and the People

Cameroon’s current electoral framework dates back to 2012. The election-management body, ELECAM, was created a decade earlier, in 2006, and hasn’t undertaken much procedural change or adopted innovations to match today’s global technological advancements. Citizens at the universally accepted majority age of 18 are deprived of the right to vote until they are 20 years old — an anomaly artificially built into the system to discourage youth engagement and participation. Paradoxically, Cameroon is currently governed by leaders in their 90s, while the median age in the country is 19.

Even basic electoral processes such as voter registration and voter-card distribution are cumbersome and highly regimented. Unlike in other African countries, the transmittal of election results is subjected to three layers of collation at the local, divisional, and national levels prior to their transmittal to the Constitutional Council by ELECAM. In contrast, neighboring Nigeria — a country with more than ninety-million registered voters — has adopted technological innovations that considerably speed up and safeguard the electronic management of election results: Polling-station results are instantaneously recorded and transmitted directly and immediately to the national data center.

The October 2025 polls also underscored the fragility of Cameroonian political parties which, even in ordinary times, are at permanent risk of suffocation by an overbearing state and administrative apparatus that shrinks political space daily. Outside of campaign season, the state allows little room or freedom for political parties to operate. The country’s notorious central prison in the capital city of Yaoundé is filled with political leaders and activists who were arrested while advocating for rights and liberties that fall squarely within the definition of regular political activities. Additionally, the election law limits the campaign period to just fifteen days, which does not give parties enough time to present platforms and engage in meaningful conversations with citizens and voters across a country with limited transportation infrastructure. No wonder that in the two-week period leading up to October 12, candidates crisscrossed the regions of Cameroon, holding rallies where they made many promises without any substantive input from voters on the professed platforms. The country could not even hold a debate among the presidential candidates — now commonplace in many African countries — because of time constraints.

Given these circumstances, the October election quickly became a referendum on personalities: The electorate essentially had to choose between the long-ruling nonagenarian Biya and his closest rival, the 76-year-old Tchiroma. Although there were ten other candidates, two of whom are not yet 40 years old, they stood little chance of success, having been nominated by small parties with neither the resources nor the name recognition or national reach to be competitive. Moreover, the continued domination of the country’s leadership by elderly politicians has stifled the interest and motivation of young political aspirants to run for office. Making matters worse, the Constitutional Council’s controversial decision to eliminate one of the main opposition candidates — 71-year-old Maurice Kamto, who had a broad base of supporters — tainted the credibility of the process.

One of the few silver linings of this election was the emergence of a determined electorate and civil society that, despite open threats of arrest and prosecution from cabinet ministers, courageously found ways to assert themselves in recruiting, training, and deploying thousands of citizen observers to monitor the vote for greater transparency and accountability. These civic groups also raised awareness about the need to protect and defend the people’s votes. Many of these civic networks remained engaged during the immediate postelection period — sharing their findings and galvanizing citizens to advocate for truth and transparency with regard to the election outcome. There is still hope that the civic leaders and activists who monitored the polls and helped raise public awareness could go on to become the incubators of much-needed electoral and political reforms. Tragically, however, some of those activists lost their lives in the countrywide demonstrations that followed the announcement of Biya’s reelection, and hundreds more were arrested.

A Dark Forecast

The story of Cameroon’s 2025 presidential election is not over. We may still see twists and turns in the months ahead, as grievances around the conduct of the poll continue to swell. The sloppy, corrupt handling of the vote has put the country’s future in jeopardy, especially as millions of Cameroonians continue to contest the outcome and aspire to greater freedoms, more accountability, and genuine democracy — the likes of which have not been seen during this regime’s 43-year reign. The country is already fragile and divided by an armed conflict, now in its eighth year, in its English-speaking regions, which Biya has failed to resolve and Tchiroma pledges to prioritize should he become president. Additionally, the country has been subjected to frequent incursions by Boko Haram and other Islamist extremist movements operating in northeastern Nigeria and the Lake Chad basin, which share a long and porous border with northern regions of Cameroon. Those regions are Tchiroma’s strongholds, and they are among the most disaffected with the poor governance of the past four decades. To Tchijroma’s credit, and fortunately for the country, he was able to expand that base of support such that his victory, as currently projected by his supporters and most of civil society, was nationwide — including in major cities and urban areas in other parts of the country. This new projection of Tchiroma as a national figure makes it even more difficult for the current regime to survive the perception of a victory stolen by the more clannish and divisive leader that Biya has become.

Cameroon’s attachment to freedom and democracy also has significant bearings on the future of all of Central Africa, where smaller and more fragile countries such as Chad, the Central Africa Republic, Congo-Brazzaville, Equatorial Guinea, and Gabon rely on peace and stability in the hegemon that Cameroon represents for them. Cameroonians, and Africans more broadly, fear the possible fallout from election-related disputes — such as the postelection violence that claimed thousands of lives in Kenya in 2008 and Côte d’Ivoire in 2010, or the military coups that followed failed or contested elections in Gabon, Guinea, and Mali in recent years.

The tragedy for Cameroon is that many citizens see through the electoral shenanigans and manipulation of unscrupulous political hacks and misguided elites, but feel a sense of helplessness. At this critical moment in Cameroon’s history, it does not augur well that the sitting president — the world’s oldest — is fast losing the battle for legitimacy in the eyes of millions of Cameroonians and is visibly too feeble and disconnected to fully apprehend the danger of a total flagellation of the already fragile nation. At the same time, the African Union and other continental entities are unable to call a spade by its name or engage in proactive preventive diplomacy amid other major crises on the continent and elsewhere. As I was reminded the other day by a democracy activist from another part of Africa, “We have watched movies like this before; and they almost never end well.”

Christopher Fomunyoh is senior associate for Africa and special advisor to the president at the National Democratic Institute for International Affairs (NDI), a U.S.-based nonprofit organization that works to support and strengthen freedom and democracy worldwide.

Copyright © 2025 National Endowment for Democracy

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