Angola's politics: a president chosen by a party list

How the president is chosen without a separate ballot

Angola held one direct presidential election, in September 1992, and it went no further than the first round. José Eduardo dos Santos took more than 49% to Jonas Savimbi's 40%, a runoff was required, and the war that resumed after the vote meant it never took place. The presidential election promised for the years after the peace of 2002 was postponed, and the constitution promulgated on 5 February 2010 removed it altogether.

Article 109 of that constitution now fixes the rule: "the individual heading the national list of the political party or coalition of political parties which receives the most votes in general elections" is elected President of the Republic and head of the executive. The name heading each list is printed on the ballot paper. The person second on the winning list becomes vice-president, an office the 2010 text created when it abolished the post of prime minister.

A candidate must be a citizen of Angolan origin, at least 35 years old and resident in the country for ten years. The term is five years, and Article 113 limits any citizen to two terms. The same constitution names Portuguese as the official language and commits the state to promoting the study and use of the other Angolan languages.

How the one-party state became a multiparty one

From independence on 11 November 1975 until 1992 the MPLA was the only legal party. After a failed coup attempt in 1977 it declared itself Marxist-Leninist and added Partido Trabalhista, Party of Labour, to its name. Economy and state were run on the Soviet and Cuban model, and the MPLA nationalised most private firms into state enterprises.

The change came from the war and from the end of the Eastern bloc. In mid-1990 the party abandoned the one-party state, dropped its Marxist-Leninist programme and the words Partido Trabalhista, and declared social democracy its platform. Angola joined the International Monetary Fund. The Bicesse Accords with UNITA in May 1991 set elections for September 1992, and the constitution of 1992, which Britannica describes as an extensively amended version of the 1975 text prepared with UNITA's acquiescence, provided for a multiparty system and a directly elected president assisted by a prime minister. It also abolished the death penalty.

The multiparty elections of 1992 gave seats in the National Assembly to twelve parties, UNITA among them. The Assembly went on working through the renewed war with UNITA members taking part, while the presidential runoff never took place. José Eduardo dos Santos, who had succeeded Agostinho Neto on his death in 1979, remained president for the rest of the war without the runoff ever being held. The constitution of 2010 abolished the separate vote, and at the election of 31 August 2012 he was returned for five more years as head of the winning MPLA list, the first president chosen under Article 109. Britannica notes that the 2010 text also strengthened the role of the president.

What the president appoints

The 2010 constitution makes the president head of state and head of government, advised by a Council of Ministers. Wikipedia's account of the executive lists the appointments that follow from the office: the ministers and secretaries of state, the members of the Constitutional Court, the Supreme Court, the Court of Auditors and the Supreme Military Court, the governor and vice-governors of the Banco Nacional de Angola, the attorney-general, the provincial governors and the commanders of the army, the police and the intelligence services. The vice-president is the one senior post the president does not name, because it comes with the winning list.

The president may issue decrees and promulgates laws, and does not make them. Legislative power belongs to the National Assembly, and the president heads the list that won the Assembly majority. Wikipedia's article on Angola states that the president, directly or indirectly, controls all other organs of the state, so that there is de facto no separation of powers. The constitution itself, in Article 2, describes a democratic state based on the rule of law and the separation of powers, and the two descriptions stand side by side in the sources.

How the National Assembly is elected

The National Assembly is a single chamber, which the constitution defines as representing all Angolans. Its members serve five-year terms, elected by proportional representation. Article 144 divides them between one national constituency, which elects 130 members, and one constituency for each province, which elects five. With eighteen provinces that made 220 seats, the number contested in 2022. Voting is open to citizens over eighteen, and the constitution includes Angolans living abroad for work, study or illness; 2022 was the first election in which Angolans abroad voted.

The results since the end of the war trace a single party's majority as it narrowed.

Freedom House found the 2012 election seriously flawed, citing outdated and inaccurate voter rolls. In 2017 and again in 2022, UNITA and CASA-CE rejected the results and took their complaints first to the National Electoral Commission and then to the Constitutional Court, which dismissed them both times.

Why the MPLA majority has narrowed

In 2022 the IPU counted 14,399,391 registered voters and 6,454,109 who voted. Eight parties and coalitions stood. Observers from the Community of Portuguese Language Countries raised concern about an electoral roll that, according to the head of their mission, still carried 2.7 million dead people. The European Union urged the electoral authorities to answer the complaints fairly and transparently.

The campaign turned on corruption, jobs and health care. The election came weeks after the death of José Eduardo dos Santos in Spain on 8 July 2022, after 38 years as president. His successor from 2017 had moved against the family: Isabel dos Santos was dismissed as head of Sonangol in November 2017 and José Filomeno dos Santos was sentenced in August 2020 to five years for fraud. Britannica records that unemployment, especially among the young, and poverty despite oil wealth were the voters' overriding concern, and that young voters overwhelmingly supported UNITA in the polls before the vote.

UNITA's 43.95% was its best result. The MPLA's 124 seats remained a majority of the 220, and the new Assembly, which met on 16 September 2022, elected its first woman president. Women took 74 of the 220 seats, 33.6%. The IPU gives 31 August 2027 as the expected date of the next election.

How the country is divided into provinces

Article 8 of the constitution makes Angola a unitary state, and the provincial governors are appointed by the president. For most of the period since independence there were eighteen provinces; by September 2024 there were twenty-one, with 162 municipalities divided into 559 communes. The census of 2024 was the first taken on the new map, and among its provinces are Icolo e Bengo, beside Luanda, and Moxico Leste, Cuando and Cubango in the east and south-east, none of which appears in the old list of eighteen.

Under Article 144 every province elects five members of the Assembly whatever its population. In the 2024 census Luanda province counted 8,665,510 people and Cuando 138,770.

What the courts can and cannot do

The legal system rests on Portuguese law and customary law. The Supreme Court is the court of appeal. The Constitutional Court was created by Law 2/08 of 17 June 2008 and was installed on 25 June 2008, and its first task was to validate the parties' candidacies for the election of that September. The sources describe its powers differently: Wikipedia's article on Angola states that it does not hold the power of judicial review, while its article on the politics of Angola says that it does and that it has eleven justices, four appointed by the president, four by the National Assembly, two by the Superior Council of the Judiciary and one elected by the public.

Courts are thin on the ground. Before 2010 they operated in only 12 of more than 140 municipalities, according to Wikipedia's account, and Britannica records that most municipal courts were still not working in the years after the war. A new penal code came into force in 2014 and made money laundering a crime. In 2019 the Assembly decriminalised homosexual acts and prohibited discrimination on grounds of sexual orientation, by 155 votes to 1 with 7 abstentions. Freedom House classed Angola as not free in its reports of 2014 and 2024, while noting increased freedoms after 2017.

Why Cabinda still has a separatist movement

The Mayombe of Cabinda's forests speak a dialect of Kikongo but were never part of the old Kongo kingdom, and in 1961 they formed a separatist movement of their own. It merged with two other Cabindan movements in 1963 to form the Front for the Liberation of the Enclave of Cabinda, FLEC, which was left out of the Alvor Agreement of 1975. Cabinda was made part of Angola that year, the government fought independence movements there until the late 1980s, and the demands for independence intensified again in 2004. A peace agreement with the main separatist group followed in 2006. Attacks rose again in 2016, and in 2017 FLEC urged Cabindans to boycott the general election.

A significant amount of Angola's oil is found off Cabinda, by Britannica's account. A second movement appeared in 2007 in the diamond province of Lunda Norte, claiming a protectorate for the Lunda Tchokwe, and it later extended its claim to the six eastern provinces. This catalogue records that both movements exist and takes no position on either claim.

Who Angola stands with abroad

Angola is a founding member of the Community of Portuguese Language Countries and belongs to the African Union, the Southern African Development Community and the Economic Community of Central African States. On 16 October 2014 the UN General Assembly elected it to a non-permanent seat on the Security Council for 2015 and 2016, with 190 votes of 193, its second term there. It chaired the International Conference on the Great Lakes Region from January 2014.

Its army, the Forças Armadas Angolanas, was created under the 1991 agreement with UNITA to draw on both armies, and more than 5,000 UNITA fighters were integrated after 2002. Its manpower was estimated at 107,000 in 2015. In March 2023 Angola deployed 500 more troops to the Democratic Republic of the Congo after the resurgence of the M23 rebellion, and it has served in the SADC mission in Cabo Delgado in Mozambique.

Oil policy produced the other break of recent years. Angola joined OPEC in 2007 and announced its departure in December 2023, effective on 1 January 2024, after the OPEC+ group lowered its production target for 2024 to 1.11 million barrels a day against the 1.18 million Angola had sought. How that decision played out is the subject of Angola's economy.