Cameroon’s presidential election will be held in 2025. Although the deadline may seem a long way off, political parties and politicians are already hard at work preparing for this major event. This is the case of Pr Maurice Kamto, recently re-elected leader of the Cameroon Renaissance Movement (CRM), who has announced an opposition coalition called the “Political Alliance for Change”.
Coalition
In the opinion of many Cameroonians, only a coalition of opposition parties can hope to have any chance of victory over the CPDM machine in a presidential election – following the example of the coalition around the leader of the SDF which won the 1992 presidential election.
Up to now, the candidates have thrown themselves into the battle in scattered ranks, and all have collided with the machinery put in place by the ruling party. Even the parties that rallied around Maurice Kamto in 2018 during the last election failed to win more than 15% according to the official results.
The first “coalition” of opposition parties – or at least some of them – served as a platform for reflection to propose an alternative to the current electoral code, which many see as an instrument for perpetuating the current regime in power.
Three years ago (at the end of November 2021), an initial proposal to revise the electoral code was submitted to the Etoudi Palace, the fruit of work by 7 political parties including the MRC and the PCRN (whose leaders came second and third respectively in the 2018 elections), despite the ban on the ceremony scheduled to present the document to the public.
On 8 August 2023, another platform, this time bringing together political parties and civil society organisations, again carried out work aimed at proposing a more consensual electoral code.
Transparency
So far, we have not heard much from the CPDM regime about the various proposals put forward by opposition parties and civil society to amend the Electoral Code. This rather eloquent silence leaves no room for hope that the proposals made by the opposition and civil society will be taken into account.
In other words, it is very likely that the 2025 elections will take place under the current electoral code, which everyone agrees is tailor-made to ensure victory for the CPDM.
On the other hand, there are increasing calls to register to vote and to watch one’s vote in the hope that the results will reflect the truth of the ballot box. If it were enough to monitor your vote, why have opposition parties and civil society organisations taken their time to propose a new electoral code?
It should be remembered that, under the current electoral code, only the reports provided by Elections Cameroon (ELECAM), the body in charge of organising elections, are taken into account during a dispute. In 2018, 32 out of 58 reports (more than half) were found to contain pages that had not been signed by all the members of the vote-counting commission, indicating that they had probably been falsified. What guarantee is there that such a case will not recur in 2025?
The coalition’s chances
At present, the coalition announced by Prof Maurice Kamto has exactly zero chance of toppling the CPDM in next year’s presidential election. Unless a miracle happens… Moreover, the ruling power will not be content with the advantage conferred on it by the electoral code. Other measures will be taken to put the opposition out of action and reduce its chances to zero.