Chad's politics: a term limit written in three times and removed twice

How the term limit was written and struck out

The constitution approved by referendum in 1996 limited the president to two terms. It came out of the National Sovereign Conference of 1993, where delegates from political parties, the government, the trade unions and the army met to design a pluralist system, and it is the one Chadian constitution reached by something close to consensus. When a committee drafted a new text in 2023 it took the 1996 constitution as its base and set the 2018 one aside, because, as the journalist Leubnoudji Tah Nathan wrote for ConstitutionNet that October, Chadians prefer the earlier document for that reason.

The limit lasted nine years. Idriss Déby won the presidency in 1996 and again in 2001, and in 2005 a constitutional referendum repealed the two-term provision so that he could stand a third time. Opposition parties and human rights organisations backed a boycott of that vote, amid reports of irregularities in voter registration and censorship of independent media during the campaign. Déby then won in 2006, 2011 and 2016 under the amended text.

The 2018 constitution put a cap back in a different shape. It abolished the post of prime minister, creating what became known as the integral presidency, and changed the term from five years with no limit to six years with a limit of two. The count was not applied retroactively, so by Britannica's reading Déby could have remained in office until 2033. A revision in 2020 added a vice-president, and a Senate that Article 118 of that revision provided for was never set up.

The constitution approved on 17 December 2023 restored a prime minister, a two-chamber parliament and a limit of two consecutive five-year terms. It held in that form for under two years. On 3 October 2025 the National Assembly and the Senate approved amendments in a session some opposition parties boycotted, and the revised text was promulgated on 8 October 2025. The government described the changes as technical, which removed the need for a confirmatory referendum. International IDEA's Democracy Tracker recorded their effect in its report for October 2025: presidential term limits abolished, the term extended from five years to seven after the next election, and the ban on a president holding office in a political party reversed, which made lawful the president's assumption of the leadership of the Patriotic Salvation Movement (MPS) in January 2025.

Why each text followed a change at the capital

The order of events has been the same each time power moved. Force settled who held N'Djamena, and a charter or a constitution was written afterwards by the people who held it. The history of Chad follows the wars themselves; what matters for the law is how each new text began.

François Tombalbaye, president from independence on 11 August 1960, banned opposition parties in 1962. An alleged conspiracy in 1963 led to the dissolution of the National Assembly, and in the December 1963 elections only government candidates stood. On 13 April 1975 units of the N'Djamena gendarmerie killed him in a coup, and a Supreme Military Council under General Félix Malloum took over. Malloum brought the rebel leader Hissène Habré into government through a Fundamental Charter signed on 25 August 1978, which named Habré prime minister and promised elections to a constituent assembly. In February 1979 Habré sent his forces against Malloum's army in the capital instead.

What followed was government by accord. The Lagos Accord of August 1979 created the Transitional Government of National Unity in November 1979 with an 18-month mandate, Goukouni Oueddei as president and Habré as minister of defence. Fighting between the two resumed in January 1980. Habré's forces entered N'Djamena in June 1982 and he formed a government that October.

Idriss Déby, one of Habré's generals, fled to Darfur in April 1989 and marched on N'Djamena in December 1990, with Libyan assistance and no opposition from the French troops stationed in the country. He suspended the constitution and formed a government with himself as president. His movement approved a national charter on 28 February 1991, political parties were legalised in 1992, and the 1993 conference designated him interim president before the 1996 constitution and the country's first multiparty presidential election.

The pattern held in 2021, with one difference: the president died and the regime survived him. Déby was declared the winner of the April 2021 election, held while the Front for Change and Concord in Chad (FACT) attacked from the north, and on 20 April the army announced that he had been killed in a battle with those rebels. The 2018 constitution named the president of the National Assembly as interim head of state, with elections to follow within 90 days. A Transitional Military Council of 15 generals instead suspended the constitution, dissolved the Assembly and the government, issued a transitional charter and named Déby's son, Mahamat Idriss Déby Itno, interim president. The generals said the speaker had declined to take on the interim, contrary to Article 81; opponents called the takeover a coup, and Britannica records that it was regarded as one.

How the military transition was managed

The council promised a transition of 18 months, ending in elections by October 2022. Talks with armed groups led to the Doha Peace Agreement in August 2022, and the Inclusive and Sovereign National Dialogue sat in N'Djamena from 20 August to 8 October 2022 with around 1,400 participants and nearly forty armed groups. Les Transformateurs, the Wakit Tamma citizen platform and nine of the armed groups present at Doha boycotted it.

The dialogue extended the transition by 24 months, dissolved the military council on paper, and named its chairman transitional president. It also removed a stipulation that interim leaders could not stand in the elections that would end the transition; members of the council had themselves expressed that bar on 21 April 2021. The transitional parliament, the National Transitional Council, was enlarged from 93 to 197 members, all appointed by the transitional president.

On 20 October 2022, the day the original mandate expired, opposition groups protested in N'Djamena and other cities. Security forces fired live ammunition. Britannica gives estimates of the dead ranging from 50 to at least 300 and records almost 1,000 arrests; the opposition, cited by the Africa Center for Strategic Studies, put the deaths in the hundreds. Opposition leaders including Succès Masra of Les Transformateurs went into exile.

A year later the regime split the opposition it had dispersed. Talks in Kinshasa in October 2023, mediated by the president of the Democratic Republic of the Congo, cleared Masra's return, and the agreement carried an amnesty for those responsible for the October 2022 killings. The transitional legislature adopted the amnesty law on 23 November 2023. Wakit Tamma and Les Démocrates rejected the deal, and the amnesty angered some members of Masra's own party.

The constitutional referendum of 17 December 2023 was organised by CONOREC, a commission whose members were all appointed by the transitional president and drawn from regime representatives and the transitional legislature. An audit it commissioned found that the electoral servers and equipment needed repair or replacement, and its contents became public only when RFI published them in June 2023. The reported turnout was almost 63%, almost 86% voted yes, and the constitution entered into force on 29 December 2023. Masra became prime minister on 1 January 2024.

Outside the country the transition met little resistance. The African Union did not sanction Chad in 2021. ConstitutionNet calls this the Chadian exception: the generals argued that the death of an elected president had left a vacuum in power, and the argument was enough to spare the country the sanctions a coup would otherwise have drawn.

Why federalism keeps reaching the agenda and leaving it

The form of the state is the question Chadian forums keep asking and Chadian constitutions keep answering the same way. The 1993 conference came close to endorsing a federation and settled on decentralisation as an intermediate stage. The 1996 constitution made the country a decentralised unitary state, and the reforms of 2005 and 2013 described it as a highly decentralised one.

Federalists argue that after more than sixty years the unitary model has exhausted itself and that excessive centralisation sits at the root of the country's conflicts. An opinion poll by the Chadian Journalist Reporters Network, published on 6 January 2023, found 71% in favour of federalism. The defenders of the unitary state, which ConstitutionNet identifies with the regime in place for four decades, answer that a federation would split the country.

The 2022 dialogue resolved to put both questions to voters in a single coupled referendum: the form of the state, and a revised version of the 1996 constitution. An earlier discussion of two separate referendums was dropped from the final report. When the vote came in December 2023 it asked only one question, whether to accept a draft that specified a unitary state. Most opposition parties, many of whom preferred a federation, called for a no vote or a boycott.

The administrative map shows what unitary means in practice. Chad is divided into 23 provinces, each headed by a governor appointed by the president, with 120 departments run by prefects below them and 454 sub-prefectures below those. The constitution requires each subdivision to be governed by an elected local assembly, and regional and local elections were held for the first time under the new text on 29 December 2024. The president's appointees still head the provinces.

What the current constitution sets up on paper

The 2023 constitution restored the semi-presidential arrangement of 1996, with a president who appoints the prime minister and the cabinet, though Wikipedia's summary of the same text describes a presidential republic with a dominant executive. The president also exercises considerable influence over the appointment of judges, generals, provincial officials and the heads of state-owned firms, and may declare a state of emergency in cases of grave and immediate threat.

The 2023 text reintroduced a second chamber. The National Assembly holds 188 seats. The Senate holds 69, of which 46 are elected indirectly by provincial and municipal councillors and 23 are appointed by the president, all for six-year terms; the Senate was installed on 7 March 2025. The president has 15 days to sign or reject a law once it passes. The Assembly approves the prime minister's programme and can force the prime minister out by a majority vote of no confidence, but if it rejects the executive's programme twice in one year, the president may dissolve it.

The courts are formally independent and in practice appointed. The Supreme Court consists of a chief justice named by the president and 15 councillors chosen by the president and the National Assembly, all for life. The Constitutional Council, nine judges on nine-year terms, reviews laws and treaties before adoption, swears in the president and rules on election disputes. The draft voters approved in 2023 moved the chair of the Superior Council of the Judiciary from the president of the republic to the president of the Supreme Court, made the High Court of Justice a separate institution again, and enlarged the Court of Auditors from 13 members to 21.

Elections are run by a permanent body, the National Elections Management Agency (ANGE), which replaced ad hoc commissions under the Ministry of Public Administration. A High Council of Traditional Chiefdoms sits among the advisory institutions, and customary law applies wherever it does not conflict with public order or the constitutional guarantee of equality.

What multiparty elections have recorded since independence

Multiparty voting began in 1996. Déby won that presidential election, with second-round support from the opposition leader Saleh Kebzabo, against General Kamougué, who had led the 1975 coup. In the legislative elections of January 1997 his MPS won 63 of 125 seats, and international observers noted serious irregularities in both votes. The MPS had been the sole legal party until 1992; some 78 registered parties have been active since.

Every presidential vote after that returned the incumbent. Déby took 63% in the first round in May 2001, with six opposition leaders arrested after the result. The opposition boycotted the 2006 election, and boycotted again in April 2011, when he won almost 89%. The run-up to the April 2016 election brought protests and a general strike, and he won against 13 other candidates. Legislative elections due in 2015 were postponed repeatedly.

The May 2024 presidential election was the first under the 2023 constitution. Official results gave the transitional president 61%, Masra, then prime minister, 18.5% by Freedom House's count, on a reported turnout of about 76%. Before the vote the opposition leader Yaya Dillo Djerou was killed at his party's headquarters in February 2024. Almost 3,000 observers were barred from monitoring the electoral process, and the Constitutional Council dismissed the challenges brought by Masra and by Albert Pahimini Padacke, who came third. Masra resigned as prime minister on 22 May 2024. The World Bank's country overview later recorded his arrest and a twenty-year sentence.

The National Assembly elections of 29 December 2024 were the first since 2011. The MPS was credited with 124 of the 188 seats, and no other party received more than 11. The electoral agency reported a turnout of 36%, which the boycotting opposition, Les Transformateurs among them, said overstated the real figure, and 34% of the members elected were women. Indirect elections for two thirds of the Senate followed on 25 February 2025.

Freedom House's report for 2025 scored Chad 1 of 40 for political rights and 14 of 60 for civil liberties, 15 of 100 in all, and classified it Not Free. It scored zero on every question about whether the head of government and the legislature were chosen in free and fair elections.

Which neighbours and allies shape Chadian politics

Libya has been an armed party to Chadian politics since the 1960s. Frolinat, founded in 1966, ran its northern war from headquarters at the oasis of Al-Kufrah in southern Libya. Libyan troops entered Chad at Goukouni's request in December 1980 and left at his request in November 1981, and Libyan forces held the northern third of the country after 1984. Habré's forces recovered most of it in 1987. The dispute over the Aouzou Strip went to the International Court of Justice, which ruled on 3 February 1994 that the 1955 Franco-Libyan treaty had fixed a permanent frontier, giving the strip to Chad. FACT, which attacked in 2021, is one of at least four armed Chadian groups the Africa Center found using southern Libya as a rear base in 2023.

Sudan has played the same part from the east. Déby organised his 1990 offensive from Darfur. On 23 December 2005 Chad declared a state of war with Sudan, which it accused of backing the rebels who attacked N'Djamena in April 2006. Rebels reached the capital again in 2008. An agreement signed on 15 January 2010 ended five years of war, reopened the border after seven years of closure and committed each side to stop the other's rebels from operating on its territory. Since the war in Sudan began in April 2023 the flow has run the other way: refugees and asylum seekers in Chad numbered 1.5 million by December 2025, according to the IMF, most of them Sudanese.

France was the third party for six decades. The defence accords signed after independence included a secret provision letting Chad request direct French intervention to maintain domestic order, and France held three bases in the country in 1972. French troops fought beside Habré in 1983 and 1984 and stood aside when Déby marched on the capital in 1990. Relations between the two governments cooled, and the last French soldiers left in early 2025.

Chad has also sent its army outward. It deployed to Mali in 2013, contributed nearly 1,500 troops to the UN mission there, joined the G5 Sahel and the Multinational Joint Task Force against Islamist insurgents, and counted 33,250 active military personnel in 2024. The record lists its memberships of the Organisation of Islamic Cooperation from 1969, the Francophonie from 1970 and CEMAC, the Central African monetary community, from 25 June 1999, beside the African Union and the United Nations.