The electoral commission said on Sunday—the deadline for applications—that 24 candidates, including Congolese President Felix Tshisekedi, had formally declared their intention to run for president in the December election.
Many people are running against Tshisekedi, including long-time adversaries, newcomers, and former presidential aspirants. According to some, this wide field may split the opposition’s support and boost his prospects of winning a second term.
The 24 candidates for the Dec. 20 election were profiled by the CENI electoral commission of the Democratic Republic of the Congo on social networking site X, formerly known as Twitter. The constitutional court will formally ratify the final list in the next weeks.
According to Tresor Kibangula, a political analyst at the Ebuteli Research Institute, difficult discussions on aligning around a single opposition leader are now occurring between some aspirants.
“It will be difficult to reach a consensus on a single candidacy as some candidates are playing for their political survival,” he stated on Sunday.
Less than three months remain until the presidential and parliamentary elections, and the United States and other international allies have accused the government of repressing opposition and freedom of expression. The presidency has refuted the charges.
The influential Catholic and Protestant churches in the Democratic Republic of the Congo, who typically support election monitoring with thousands of observers, have criticized the openness of the voting process itself.
The sending of an observation delegation by the European Union has also been invited. The EU spokeswoman cautioned that the Congolese authorities must satisfy particular requirements for such a deployment. Still, she said that the bloc is considering the proposal and that talks are continuing.
All of the opposition candidates, including Nobel Prize-winning gynecologist Denis Mukwege, who is running for the first time, and Martin Fayulu, who finished second to Tshisekedi in the 2018 election and fought the outcome in court, have expressed alarm about the possibility of electoral fraud.
The CENI has stated that election preparations are proceeding according to plan and refuted claims of problems in the electoral roll, which were the cause of violent anti-government demonstrations in May.
The way the commission handled the issue with the electoral roll and “the shrinking of the political space, sets the stage for the contestation of the results, and even possible electoral violence,” according to analyst Kibangula.
The mineral-rich nation, which currently struggles to handle a variety of armed factions and an uprising in the east, would become even more unstable with further political instability.
