Less than ten months before the Congolese presidential election, DRC President Félix Tshisekedi is hesitating between maintaining and postponing the ballot.
Clearly, the presidential election in the Democratic Republic of Congo is more than compromised. Scheduled for the end of the year, there is more and more talk of it being postponed. And this for many reasons. The first is the delay taken by the power in place regarding the overhaul of laws and institutions relating to elections. Among these, the Independent National Electoral Commission (Ceni). On the one hand, the power in place knows that it is, in terms of timetable, very fair. On the other hand, the opposition believes that we should not rush. Martin Fayulu, for example, believes that the elections will be transparent provided that all the camps "meet around a table to review the electoral law and re-examine the composition of the Ceni and the Constitutional Court".
If everyone agrees, could postponing the ballot be the easy solution? Not so sure. Because if the opponents of Felix Tshisekedi are unanimous on one point, it is that of the constitutional deadlines. Even if the presidential election is postponed, they say, the current president will have to leave power no later than January 23, 2024, as provided for by the texts. In other words, who says postponement necessarily says political crisis. Because in the event of a return of the ballot and respect for the laws, the transitional presidency will be held by the President of the Senate, who will have to organize new elections within a maximum period of four months, i.e. before the end of May 2024.
Macron sets his conditions
Not sure that Felix Tshisekedi is going in this direction. However, the outgoing president faces another problem: North Kivu. While the Ceni has recently started its voter registration operations in this region, the populations on the spot are more occupied by the conflict which takes place there than by these operations.
During Emmanuel Macron's visit to the DRC, the question of meeting election deadlines was raised by a journalist. Emmanuel Macron initially asked "that there be voter registration and voting systems that are of the highest standard, that there be international observers deployed everywhere with, for example, an association of religious communities so that in a very local way that he can have observers from each polling station and that there is a process of trust that is put in place”. For their part, precisely the religious communities are asking, without for the moment expressly saying so, for a postponement of the ballot.
And with an M23 still very active despite a timetable supposed to bring peace to eastern DRC, the outgoing president does not currently seem concerned about his re-election. “Until this point, I don't know how we're going to go about it. Should the voter registration process be halted while waiting for peace to return, with the risk that this will impact compliance with the timetable? Should we continue the process without taking into account the large populations of people displaced by war? This is what can be a problem, ”says Félix Tshisekedi.