Burundi's politics: a constitution that counts by ethnic group

How the constitution shares power between groups

The 2018 constitution, in the English translation published by the Constitute Project, describes Burundi as an independent, sovereign, secular, democratic and unitary republic. Most constitutions say that much. What sets this one apart is how often it names Hutu, Tutsi and Twa, and how precisely it says how many of each must sit where.

The shares are enforced after the vote. If an election to the National Assembly produces a chamber that does not match them, Article 169 has the imbalance corrected by co-opting members under the electoral code. The Wikipedia article on the country gives the resulting size of the chamber as between 118 and 123 members in the parliaments it describes.

The executive is balanced in pairs. Article 124 requires the president and the vice-president to come from different ethnic groups and different parties, or to be independents of different ethnicity. Article 135 requires the minister responsible for the National Defence Force and the minister responsible for the National Police to be of different ethnic groups. Article 78 requires every political party to be open to all Burundians, to reflect the national character in its leadership, and not to advocate exclusion or hatred on ethnic, regional, religious or gender grounds.

The arrangement is described as temporary. Article 289 gives the Senate five years after the institutions it creates are in place to evaluate whether to end or continue the quotas in the executive, the legislature and the judiciary.

Where the arithmetic came from

Burundi's earlier constitutions tried a different answer. The constitution of March 1992, adopted after the killings of 1988, banned parties that adhered to tribalism, divisionalism or violence and required every party to include both Hutu and Tutsi, according to Britannica. It produced the election of June 1993 and the presidency of Melchior Ndadaye, killed in a coup that October, and the civil war that followed.

The Arusha Peace and Reconciliation Agreement, signed in August 2000 after talks mediated by Julius Nyerere and then Nelson Mandela, replaced the ban with shares. It set up a transitional government whose presidency rotated between a Tutsi and a Hutu every 18 months, and it called for an army balanced between the two groups. A constitution approved in 2005 with more than 90% of the vote put the shares into law. The Wikipedia country article calls the design associational: it guarantees the Tutsi minority representation without, in principle, putting the ethnic division at the centre of politics.

Under the 2005 constitution the first president after the transition, Pierre Nkurunziza, was elected by parliament on 19 August 2005, with 151 of 161 votes, as the sole candidate.

How the army was rebuilt

The army was the institution the arithmetic was most needed for. From 1966 to 1993 it had been dominated by Tutsi officers, and it was officers who killed Ndadaye in 1993. Arusha called for a force balanced between Hutu and Tutsi, and the Wikipedia history of the civil war describes the integration of former CNDD-FDD fighters after the power-sharing deal of October 2003 as going well, with Tutsi and Hutu troops staying loyal to the new government. The 2018 constitution keeps the result in general terms. The Defence and Security Corps, a national defence force and a national police, must form a non-discriminatory, non-ethnic and non-sexist internal culture under Article 253, may not act against the interests of any legal party under Article 250, and under Article 82 their members, like serving magistrates, may not join a party at all.

The constitution also binds its officers to a document of reconciliation. Candidates for the presidency must subscribe to the Charter of National Unity as well as the constitution, and the oaths of office swear fidelity to it. The holiday decree of 2021 keeps a public holiday for the same idea on 5 February, the Day of Unity and National Reconciliation.

What the referendum changed about the presidency

The quarrel that reshaped the presidency was about terms. In April 2015 Nkurunziza's party confirmed him as its candidate for a third term. Critics, including some members of his own party, held that both the Arusha agreement and the constitution limited a president to two elected terms; his supporters argued that the first term, given by parliament, did not count. The Constitutional Court agreed with them on 5 May 2015, a coup attempt on 13 May failed, and the election went ahead in July with the opposition boycotting it.

A referendum on 17 May 2018 then rewrote the executive. Britannica records the amendments passing with 73% of the vote; the Wikipedia history gives 79.08%. Under the resulting text:

• The president is elected by direct universal suffrage for a seven-year term, renewable, with no more than two consecutive terms (Article 97). Candidates must be over 40.
• The election is held in two rounds: a candidate needs an absolute majority of votes cast, and otherwise the two leading candidates meet in a second round 15 days later (Article 103).
• The president is assisted by one vice-president, approved by both chambers voting separately, where there had been two.
• A prime minister, head of the government, coordinates the ministers (Article 129).

Britannica notes that critics warned the amendments were incompatible with the power-sharing provisions of the Arusha agreement, and that the referendum allowed for ethnic quotas in government and public service to be dropped. The quotas stayed in the text, now under the five-year review of Article 289. Article 4 of the same constitution says that the restoration of the monarchy must be put to a referendum and that a party pursuing it peacefully may operate.

How parliament is elected and filled

Parliament has two chambers. Deputies in the National Assembly serve five years and are elected by direct universal suffrage; the Wikipedia article on politics in Burundi describes proportional representation with a threshold of 2%. Candidates must be at least 25. The three Twa deputies are co-opted, not elected.

The Senate is indirect. Each province sends two delegates elected by an electoral college of communal councillors, chosen by separate ballots from different ethnic communities, and three Twa senators sit beside them. The Wikipedia articles describe a Senate of 49 or 51 members under the old map of 18 provinces. The World Bank's country overview reports that one party won 100 of the 103 seats in the National Assembly and 10 of the 13 seats in the Senate at the 2025 legislative election, and that the next presidential election is scheduled for 2027.

The electoral rules themselves were rewritten in April 2024. Human Rights Watch reports that the new electoral code raised the fee for registering a candidacy, up to 100 million Burundian francs for a presidential candidate, and made candidates who leave a party wait two years before standing as independents. In August 2024, according to Freedom House, parliament approved new members of the Independent National Electoral Commission, whose duty under Article 186 is to check the admissibility of candidacies.

How the provinces and communes were redrawn

The provinces and communes were created by a Belgian colonial decree in 1959, replacing the system of chieftaincies. By the 2020s the country had 18 provinces, including Bujumbura Mairie and Bujumbura Rural, which were split from one another in 2000, and 119 communes divided into 3,044 collines, or hills.

A territorial reform replaced that map. The Présidence dates the reform to 2023 and the World Bank says the new structure came into effect in July 2025. Burundi now has five provinces, Bujumbura, Gitega, Butanyerera, Buhumuza and Burunga, and 42 communes, with the stated aim of bringing administration closer to the people.

The capital moved in the same period. Article 9 of the constitution fixes it at Bujumbura but lets a law move it or separate the political capital from the economic one. That is what parliament did on 16 January 2019, after an announcement of 24 December 2018: Gitega, the seat of the kings until 1966, became the political capital and Bujumbura remained the economic capital. Britannica records that the move of government offices, expected to finish in about 2022, was still under way in the following years.

What courts and outside monitors record

The courts are headed by the Supreme Court, with three courts of appeal below it, a tribunal of first instance in each province and 123 local tribunals, on the Wikipedia description. Constitutional questions go to a Constitutional Court of seven members, at least four of them career magistrates, who serve a single term of eight years; it was that court which approved the third presidential term in 2015.

Outside assessments are severe and dated. Freedom House rated Burundi Not Free in its 2025 report, with 15 points out of 100: 4 of 40 for political rights and 11 of 60 for civil liberties. It scored the judiciary, freedom of assembly and the independence of the media at zero. Human Rights Watch's report on 2024 describes the restriction of civil society and independent media, and enforced disappearances and arbitrary arrests before the 2025 elections; it notes that the media law had been revised for the fourth time since 2013. Freedom House records that in November 2024 more than 5,400 prisoners, about 41% of the prison population, were pardoned and released, in a system holding roughly three times its official capacity of 4,290.

Two decisions drew criticism from abroad. In 2009 Burundi made consensual same-sex relations an offence punishable by three months to two years in prison or a fine, a law Amnesty International condemned. In October 2017 it became the first state to leave the International Criminal Court, which had opened an investigation into crimes alleged between April 2015 and October 2017.

Who Burundi stands with in the region

Burundi belongs to both the East African and the Central African regional communities. It joined the East African Community in July 2007 by the Community's own account, and it hosts the Community's East African Health Research Commission. It is also a member of the Economic Community of Central African States, of the Common Market for Eastern and Southern Africa, and, since its reconstitution in April 2007, of the Economic Community of the Great Lakes Countries with the Democratic Republic of the Congo and Rwanda. Beyond the region it belongs to the African Union, the United Nations, the Organisation internationale de la Francophonie and the World Trade Organization, which it joined on 23 July 1995 after a membership of the GATT that began on 13 March 1965.

Relations with Rwanda, the neighbour that shared its colonial administration, have been the hardest. The Burundian government accused Rwanda of letting rebels cross from the Nyungwe forest in July 2015, which Rwanda denied, and in January 2024 it closed the land border after attacks by the RED-Tabara rebel group, which Rwanda has been accused of supporting, according to Freedom House. British travel advice in 2026 still described the Rwandan border as closed.