The ghost of 2020: Will Ivory Coast avoid another election crisis?
As Côte d’Ivoire inches toward its next presidential election, many Ivorians are haunted by memories of 2020, a year that reignited violent divisions, cost dozens of lives, and cast a long shadow over the country’s democratic future.
Today, the same patterns are emerging again: disputed candidacies, allegations of a corrupted voter list, arrests of protestors and journalists, and a president pushing past term limits.
“People are supposed to be in the streets for three or four days until the guy changes position,” an Ivorian journalist told me in a recent interview. “But some people are afraid."
"Do you know that since the day the guy took power in 2010, until today, there have been some people in jail? Can you believe this?" he added.
That fear is not unfounded. In the lead-up to the 2020 election, at least 85 people were killed in political violence after President Alassane Ouattara announced he would run for a third term, a move widely seen as unconstitutional at the time.
The opposition boycotted the vote, labelling it a “constitutional coup,” and the resulting low-turnout election saw Ouattara claim over 94% of the vote.
The current tensions lie in the electoral list, which opposition leaders claim is deliberately packed with non-Ivorian names to tip the scales in favour of the ruling party.
“Even if it is Jesus Christ, this president will win,” said the journalist. “Because he has put so many foreign people inside.”
The 2002 civil war and the post-electoral crisis of 2010 were both rooted in disputes over who qualifies as truly Ivorian. In a country with a significant immigrant population, opposition leaders say Ouattara’s electoral commission is exploiting that legacy to manufacture loyalty through questionable registrations.
Efforts to audit or revise the register have been rebuffed. “What is the most important? It is to check one by one, all people on the list to see if they are Ivorian or not. The guy will refuse. Because if this list is cleared, he will never win — never, never, never.”
Many fear a repeat of 2020’s violence, or worse. The opposition has signalled that unless the electoral list is revised and all qualified candidates reinstated, they may reject the results outright. “I’m not sure this election will be held,” the journalist confessed. “If on the 25th of this month the election is not held, from the 26th morning he is no more the president. There will be someone — not involved in politics — to organise it.” It’s a scenario that edges the country close to *constitutional rupture*.
Should protests escalate or the vote be widely discredited, international mediation may be required, as was the case in 2011, when post-election violence ended only after French and UN troops intervened. For now, Ivorians live with a sense of déjà vu.
This story is written and edited by the Global South World team, you can contact us here.
