Interim President Mahamat Idriss Deby won Chad’s May 6 presidential election with more than 61 percent of the vote, the country’s election body said, citing provisional results. The vote marks the end of the country’s transitional period after Deby took power in a coup in April 2021 following the death of his father, who himself had been in power since 1990. (Reuters)
Our Take
The election outcome is no surprise and in many ways has been a foregone conclusion since Deby seized power more than three years ago. So while it technically represents the culmination of Chad’s “democratic transition,” in reality nothing has fundamentally changed for the country or for the Deby regime.
Deby’s father held power for more than three decades, largely through a combination of clientelism and cooptation of opposition figures, while playing off competing clans against each other and fighting back recurring armed insurrections, which is how he met his death. He, too, paid lip service to elections, while cracking down on opposition protest movements when necessary.