DR Congo's politics: a term limit no amendment can touch

What the constitution of the Third Republic sets up

The present order is called the Third Republic, a name Laurent-Désiré Kabila declared at his inauguration in May 1997 after the fall of Mobutu Sese Seko. The text is younger than the name. The Pretoria agreement of December 2002 led to a power-sharing transitional constitution in April 2003, the transitional government took office that July, voters approved a permanent constitution by referendum in December 2005, and it went into effect in February 2006. Law No. 11/002 of 20 January 2011 amended several articles, and that revised text is the one in force.

The design is semi-presidential. The president is head of state, elected by direct universal suffrage "for a mandate of five years renewable a single time" under Article 70, and is commander-in-chief of the armed forces. Under Article 78 the president appoints the prime minister "from within the parliamentary majority after consultation with it", and the prime minister and cabinet answer to the legislature.

Parliament has two chambers. National deputies are elected directly for five years, each one together with two substitutes, and the electoral law sets how many there are: the National Assembly had 500 seats after the elections of 2011 and the same total after those of 2018. Senators are elected indirectly, by the provincial assemblies, also for five years. Article 104 adds a category of senator no election fills, since every former elected president sits in the Senate for life. In 2025 that clause determined how a former president could be put on trial.

The judiciary the 2006 text created replaced the old Supreme Court with three apex bodies: a Constitutional Court for the constitutionality of laws, electoral disputes and conflicts between the branches; a Court of Cassation as the last resort in civil and military cases; and a Council of State for administrative law, with a Military High Court beside them. The electoral role is what has given the Constitutional Court its political weight. It ruled on the delay of 2016, it upheld the result of 2018, and in 2023 it held that the problems observers reported would not have changed the presidential outcome.

Which clauses no amendment may touch

Article 218 sets out the ordinary route to amendment. The initiative belongs to the president, to the government, to half the members of either chamber, or to 100,000 citizens by petition. Both chambers must approve the text by an absolute majority, and the change then goes to a referendum unless the two chambers sitting together in Congress pass it by three-fifths of their members. Article 219 closes that route for as long as a state of war, emergency or siege is in force, during an interim presidency, and whenever the chambers are prevented from meeting freely.

Article 220 closes it for good on a short list: the republican form of the state, universal suffrage, representative government, the independence of the judiciary, political and trade union pluralism, and "the number and the duration of the mandates of the President of the Republic". A second paragraph forbids any revision whose object or effect is to reduce individual rights and freedoms or the prerogatives of the provinces. Of everything on that list, the presidential mandate is the item that has been tested, and the text offers no procedure for changing it.

The constitution also imposes a duty on citizens that has been read in more than one way. Article 64 requires every Congolese "to oppose any individual or group of individuals who seize power by force or who exercise it in violation of the provisions of this Constitution". In June 2017, six months after Kabila's second mandate had expired with no successor elected, a coalition of Mai-Mai militias led by the Bembe commander William Yakutumba took the name National Coalition of the People for the Sovereignty of Congo, also called the Alliance of Article 64, and cited the clause against Kabila. A constitutional duty had become the name of an armed group.

How one amendment changed the presidential count

The first presidential election under the new text, on 30 July 2006, was also the first multi-party national vote since independence. Joseph Kabila, who had led the transitional government, took 45% in the first round and Jean-Pierre Bemba 20%. Fighting between the two camps in the streets of Kinshasa from 20 to 22 August 2006 killed sixteen people before police and the United Nations mission, then called MONUC, took control of the city. Kabila won the run-off in October 2006 with 70%, Bemba alleged irregularities, and Kabila was sworn in on 6 December 2006.

The two-round system lasted for that one election. The amendment of 20 January 2011 rewrote Article 71 so that it now reads, in full, that the president "is elected by the simple majority of the suffrage expressed". Britannica records that the change made it possible to win without a majority of voters behind the winner, and that many observers thought it improved Kabila's chances.

Eleven candidates stood on 28 November 2011. Kabila was declared the winner with 49% against 32% for Étienne Tshisekedi, and the Supreme Court confirmed the result. Observers from the Carter Center reported that returns from almost 2,000 polling stations in areas where Tshisekedi's support was strong had been lost and left out of the official count, and described the election as lacking credibility. Kabila was inaugurated on 20 December 2011, and Tshisekedi had himself sworn in as president three days later.

The assembly elected beside Kabila in 2011 was fragmented. Results released in January and February 2012 put more than 100 parties in the National Assembly, none with a majority, with Kabila's party and its allies holding slightly more than half of the 500 seats. That fragmentation has a short history. Mobutu's Popular Movement of the Revolution was the sole legal party from 1970 to 1990, and Mobutu lifted the ban on opposition parties in April 1990. More than 600 parties have registered since that opening, and four of them, the UDPS, the PPRD, the UNC and the MLC, operate across the whole country.

Why the vote to replace Kabila arrived late

Article 220 fixed the number of terms. Article 70 supplied the sentence that governed what happened when the second one ran out: the president "remains in his functions until the effective installation of the newly elected President". Kabila's second mandate was due to end on 19 December 2016, and from 2013 there were fears, Britannica records, that he would stay on either by modifying the constitution or by postponing the election.

How administration slowed the timetable

In January 2015 a proposed law would have allowed Kabila to remain in office until a national census had been carried out. Student-led protests at the University of Kinshasa began on 19 January 2015, and by 21 January clashes with police had killed at least 42 people by one count and 15 by the government's. The same year the administration proposed a series of steps to precede the election, among them a national census, a new voter register expected to take more than a year to compile, and a reorganisation of the administrative units that would more than double the number of provinces.

In May 2016 the Constitutional Court ruled that if the vote were delayed, Kabila could remain until a successor was elected. The second paragraph of Article 70 sets no limit on how long that interval may last. In September 2016 the electoral commission asked the court to allow the postponement. Protests in Kinshasa that month were put down by police and Republican Guard soldiers, with 80 dead by the opposition's count, and in October 2016 the court granted the request. On 27 November 2016 the foreign minister, Raymond Tshibanda, said no election would be held that year. Protests on 20 December 2016, the day after the mandate ended, left dozens dead and hundreds arrested.

What the agreement of New Year's Eve promised

On 31 December 2016 the government and most opposition groups signed a compromise: Kabila would remain president of a transitional arrangement with a prime minister chosen from the opposition until an election in 2017. The election was eventually set for 23 December 2018. In August 2018 Kabila's spokesperson confirmed that he would not stand, and the PPRD put forward Emmanuel Ramazani Shadary. The electoral commission disqualified Jean-Pierre Bemba over International Criminal Court charges, and Moïse Katumbi was blocked from returning to the country in time to register.

Ten days before the vote a fire in Kinshasa destroyed thousands of voting machines and other election materials. The commission postponed polling to 30 December 2018, then moved voting in Beni, Butembo and Yumbi to March 2019 on grounds of insecurity and an Ebola outbreak. The new president was to be inaugurated in January 2019, so the electorate of those three areas, about 3% of registered voters, had no say in the presidential result. After polls closed the government cut internet access in some regions until the results were out.

What the first peaceful transfer settled

On 10 January 2019 the electoral commission declared Félix Tshisekedi, son of Étienne Tshisekedi, who had died in 2017, the winner with more than 38%, against almost 35% for Martin Fayulu and almost 24% for Shadary. A pre-election poll and the observer mission of the Catholic bishops' conference, CENCO, both had Fayulu in the lead, and a leaked set of election data and CENCO's own tally both showed him with about 60%. Fayulu and others alleged a deal: victory for Tshisekedi in exchange for protecting the interests of Kabila and his associates. Representatives of both men denied it.

The Constitutional Court upheld the result and Tshisekedi was sworn in on 24 January 2019. Britannica, the Council on Foreign Relations and Wikipedia all record the inauguration as the first peaceful transfer of power since independence in 1960, and all three also record the doubts about the count. Both statements are part of the record and this article adjudicates neither.

How the president governed beside his predecessor

The legislative count of December 2018 gave Kabila's coalition about two-thirds of the National Assembly, Fayulu's coalition more than a fifth and Tshisekedi's a small fraction of that. The government unveiled in August 2019 gave most cabinet posts to Kabila's coalition. It introduced free primary education in 2019, and Britannica records that the arrangement impeded most of the president's other policy goals. In December 2020 Tshisekedi announced that he would dissolve the coalition and build a new one, the Sacred Union of the Nation, and as deputies changed sides he gained the support of almost 400 of the 500 members of the National Assembly. The pro-Kabila speakers of both chambers were forced out, and a government without Kabila's supporters took office in April 2021.

What the next general election recorded

Presidential, legislative, provincial and local elections were held together on 20 December 2023, and for the first time Congolese abroad could vote from some locations. More than a million people in parts of North Kivu held by the M23 rebel group could not vote, because M23 had not let officials register them. The electoral commission declared Tshisekedi re-elected with 73% against 18% for Katumbi, and his coalition won more than nine-tenths of the seats in the National Assembly. The observer mission of the Catholic and Protestant churches had called the vote an "electoral catastrophe", and its final report of June 2024 found "numerous irregularities likely to undermine the integrity of the election results" while stopping short of calling the polls fraudulent.

Assembling a government from so large a coalition took months. The prime minister appointed on 1 April 2024 was the first woman to hold the post, and the government took office on 12 June 2024. Freedom House's 2025 edition scored the country 4 of 40 for political rights and 14 of 60 for civil liberties, with the status Not Free, and the Economist Intelligence Unit classed it as an authoritarian regime in 2024.

Why a former president lost his immunity

Article 104 made Joseph Kabila a senator for life when he left office in January 2019, and members of parliament can be prosecuted only with the authorisation of their own chamber. In April 2025 Kabila, by then openly critical of the government's handling of the M23 offensive, announced that he wanted to help find a solution to the conflict in the east. Later that month the government accused him of ties to M23, suspended the PPRD and said it would seize his assets, and the military prosecutor asked the Senate to lift his immunity.

The Senate voted to do so on 22 May 2025. Kabila was charged with treason among other crimes for his alleged support of M23 and of the Congo River Alliance, the political front allied to it. His trial opened on 25 July 2025 without him, and Britannica records that on 30 September 2025 he was found guilty and sentenced to death in absentia; Wikipedia dates the sentence to October 2025. The Council on Foreign Relations records him living in Goma under M23 protection and sanctioned by the United States in April 2026 for allegedly supporting Rwanda-backed rebel groups.

The Congo River Alliance itself was launched in December 2023, the month of the general election, and its stated aims included overthrowing the government. Its leader, Corneille Nangaa, had headed the electoral commission from 2015 to 2021, so the man in charge of the commission through the delayed vote of 2018 went on to lead the political front of the rebellion in the east.

How the provinces were redrawn and funded

The number of provinces has been a constitutional question since the first years of independence. The Luluabourg Constitution, ratified by referendum in June 1964, raised the count from six to 21 and gave the provinces more autonomy, and it was the text that renamed the state the Democratic Republic of the Congo. After 1997 the country was organised as ten provinces and the city of Kinshasa. Article 2 of the 2006 constitution names 25 provinces plus Kinshasa, while Article 226 kept the ten old provinces in place until a separate law installed the new ones, and the new structure took until 2015 to be put in place. It was one of the measures of 2015 that many expected to delay the presidential election.

The provinces are divided into 145 territories and 33 cities, and below them the constitution recognises the city, the commune, the sector and the chefferie as decentralised entities with their own legal personality. Article 175 sets the provinces' share of revenue of a national character at 40% and specifies that the share is "retained at its source". The second paragraph of Article 220 then forbids any amendment that would reduce the prerogatives of the provinces, which places provincial powers on the same footing as the presidential term.

Kinshasa holds the status of a province and is the seat of the national institutions. Article 2 adds that the capital may only be moved by referendum.

Who stands with Kinshasa in the east

The Democratic Republic of the Congo belongs to regional bodies that face in different directions. It sits in the Southern African Development Community, the East African Community, the Economic Community of Central African States and the Common Market for Eastern and Southern Africa, it joined the African Continental Free Trade Area in 2022, and it has been a member of the Organisation internationale de la Francophonie since 1977. Article 217 allows treaties of association that involve "a partial relinquishment of sovereignty with a view to promote African unity".

What the regional memberships have meant in war

SADC membership counted in 1998, when fellow members Angola, Namibia and Zimbabwe answered Laurent-Désiré Kabila's request for help against rebels backed by Rwanda and Uganda. It counted again in May 2023, when SADC deployed troops ahead of the December 2023 election. A force of the East African Community spent about a year in the east and completed its withdrawal in December 2023. Both blocs ran mediation from 2022, the EAC through the Nairobi process and the African Union through the Luanda process, and Britannica records that little progress was achieved through either.

What the United Nations mission was asked to do

The United Nations mission was created on 30 November 1999, and on 24 February 2000 the Security Council authorised 5,537 troops to monitor the ceasefire. On 28 March 2013 Resolution 2098 created a Force Intervention Brigade within it, the first peacekeeping unit tasked with offensive operations. In September 2023 the government asked the mission, by then named MONUSCO, to leave before the new year; the Security Council extended its mandate through 2024 and a slower drawdown began.

M23 resurfaced in 2022 after five years of inactivity, took the Rubaya coltan mining area in April 2024, and seized Goma in January 2025 and Bukavu in February 2025, with considerable support from Rwanda according to Britannica, which Rwanda denied. Two negotiating tracks followed. In Doha, M23 and the government signed a ceasefire on 19 July 2025 and a framework for peace on 15 November 2025. In Washington, the Congolese and Rwandan governments signed a peace agreement on 27 June 2025, and the two presidents signed the Washington Accords for Peace and Prosperity on 4 December 2025, alongside agreements giving United States companies access to Congolese minerals. Fighting continued after both.