Lesotho's politics: chiefs in the Senate, coalitions in the Assembly

What the king may and may not do

The constitution of 1993 makes the King of Lesotho "a constitutional monarch and Head of State". Executive authority is vested in him, but section 86 says it is exercised through officers of the government, and almost every act he performs is done on advice: he appoints as prime minister the member of the National Assembly who appears to the Council of State to lead the party or coalition with a majority, appoints the other ministers on the prime minister's advice, and dissolves or prorogues Parliament on that advice. Wikipedia's article on the country's politics summarises the office as a "living symbol of national unity" with no executive or legislative powers, and Freedom House describes the king as a ceremonial head of state.

The limits are written in because they were once ignored. Moshoeshoe II, king at independence, was given executive powers by the military government in 1986 and stripped of them and exiled in 1990, and in August 1994 his son suspended Parliament with the backing of part of the army before regional pressure restored the elected government within a month. The 1993 text bars the king from political initiatives, and the history article follows the episodes in order.

The king still has duties of his own. Land is the clearest. Section 107 vests all land in Lesotho in the Basotho Nation, and section 108 gives the king the power to allocate it, in trust for the nation; in rural areas, the BTI's 2026 report explains, chiefs and community councils allocate land under customary law, while the Land Act of 2010 allows leases of up to 99 years. Foreigners cannot own land outright.

Who chooses the king of Lesotho

Succession is hereditary, under customary law. Where no successor emerges, section 45 directs the College of Chiefs to "proceed to designate a person to succeed to the office of King" with all practical speed, and the college also designates a regent when one is needed. Under section 104 it consists of the 22 Principal Chiefs listed in the second schedule, from the Principal Chief of Botha-Bothe to the Principal Chief of Malingoaneng. Wikipedia's politics article adds that under traditional law the college may even depose the monarch.

The same chiefs make up two-thirds of the upper house.

A law needs the passage of both houses and the king's assent. Ministers come from the National Assembly or from the 11 nominated senators. Freedom House notes that the principal chiefs wield considerable authority in rural areas, and that chieftainship, under the Chieftainship Act of 1968, can only be inherited by men. A complaint against that rule went to the African Commission on Human and Peoples' Rights in 2014 after the Constitutional Court declined to strike it down, and the commission had not ruled when Freedom House reported in 2025.

How the mixed electoral system came about

At independence the assembly was elected entirely from constituencies, and the result could be lopsided: the Basotho Congress Party took every one of 65 seats in 1993, and its successor, the Lesotho Congress for Democracy, 79 of 80 in May 1998. The 1998 result set off the protests, the mutiny and the SADC intervention of that September. In December 1998 an Interim Political Authority was set up, with two members from each of the 12 parties that had contested the election, to redesign the system.

It kept the 80 constituency seats and added 40 filled by proportional representation, a mixed-member system first used in May 2002, when opposition parties won all 40 of the proportional seats. The 2011 Electoral Act requires parties to alternate men and women on their candidate lists, and a law of the same year reserves at least 30% of local council seats for women. Freedom House reports that only a quarter of the members elected in 2022 were women.

The Independent Electoral Commission runs elections and funds registered parties from the Consolidated Fund. Over 50 parties contested the 2022 election, against 27 in 2017, and the BTI counts about 65 parties registered with the commission. Turnout in 2022 was 37%, the lowest recorded, and at the local elections of September 2023 it was about 26%.

Why coalitions have rarely lasted

Proportional seats made single-party majorities harder to win, and the 2012 election produced the country's first coalition. The BTI's 2026 report describes the years since as a coalition era of "unprecedented political instability": the 2012 government suspended Parliament in June 2014 to avoid a no-confidence vote, the government elected in 2015 collapsed in 2017, and the prime minister returned in 2017 resigned in May 2020 after being named a suspect in the murder of his estranged wife. Freedom House observes that power has rotated frequently between coalitions led by the Democratic Congress and the All Basotho Convention since 2012.

The constitution sets out how a government falls. If the National Assembly passes a vote of no confidence and the prime minister neither resigns nor advises a dissolution within three days, the king, on the advice of the Council of State, may remove him or dissolve Parliament. The ninth amendment to the constitution would have allowed Parliament to replace a prime minister without an election unless two-thirds of members demanded one. The Court of Appeal struck it down in 2024 in a split judgment, holding that it tampered with the basic structure of the constitution and would remove the electorate from the choice of government.

How the army entered politics

The Lesotho Defence Force has been at the centre of every crisis since independence. It ruled from 1986 to 1993; its junior ranks mutinied in 1998; in August 2014 the prime minister fled to South Africa after he tried to replace the commander, Tlali Kamoli, saying a coup was under way, which the army denied. Kamoli's appointed successor, Maaparankoe Mahao, was killed by soldiers in June 2015, in circumstances that the Ministry of Defence and his family described differently, and the commander who replaced Kamoli in 2016, Khoantle Motsomotso, was shot dead in September 2017.

SADC has been the outside party each time. It sent the Langa commission and then troops in 1998, mediated the Maseru Facilitation Declaration that brought the election forward to February 2015, set up the Phumaphi commission of inquiry into Mahao's death, and, according to Freedom House, appointed a National Reforms Authority in 2019 to run a reform process partly covering the security services; Freedom House adds that those major reforms have not materialised. The BTI's 2026 report describes the Omnibus Bill, a comprehensive package of constitutional amendments, as a measure successive governments have struggled to pass, and records that the National Assembly completed the Tenth Amendment to the Constitution Bill only in January 2025 and that the Senate had yet to pass it when the review period closed.

Freedom House describes political violence as discouraging open debate and records continuing allegations against the security services. In May 2024 the government invoked the Internal Security Act, banned 12 famo music groups linked to gang killings and deployed the army in an operation in which soldiers were accused of torturing four people and killing two. In the same year the army commander criticised judges as lenient, which civil society groups and opposition parties condemned as a threat to the rule of law. The trial of soldiers including Kamoli for Mahao's murder, on charges laid in 2017, resumed in 2024.

How chiefs and councils run the districts

Below Parliament the country is divided into ten districts, each headed by a district administrator and each with a camptown as its capital. The districts are subdivided into 80 constituencies and 129 local community councils. Local councils are elected separately: at the elections of September 2023, 1,268 council seats were contested, independent candidates won 105, and turnout was just over 26%, Freedom House reports, with no incidents of violence recorded.

The chieftaincy runs alongside the councils. Britannica describes traditional authority as extending from the king through the chiefs to the village, with the chiefs largely responsible for working and distributing land, an authority curtailed in some areas by the Land Act of 1979. The BTI's 2026 report notes that in rural areas customary law still governs land allocation through chiefs and community councils, and its summary of the Afrobarometer survey of 2024 found trust in traditional and religious leaders and in the army running well above trust in parties, Parliament and the electoral commission; 69% of respondents said they had faith in the king.

How the courts and civil liberties hold up

The judiciary consists of the High Court, the Court of Appeal, magistrates' courts and customary courts, which sit mostly in rural areas. There is no jury. Lesotho has a dual legal system: customary law, written down in 1903 as the Laws of Lerotholi, runs beside general law built on Roman-Dutch law imported from the Cape and on Lesotho statutes. Judges are often drawn from other Commonwealth countries, especially South Africa, and Wikipedia's article on the country notes that all but one of the Court of Appeal's justices are South African. Appeals to the Privy Council in London ended in 1970.

Freedom House's 2025 assessment credits the courts with asserting their power of review, as in the ninth amendment case, and the Judicial Service Commission with advertising posts and interviewing candidates in public since 2022, but describes the judiciary as under-resourced and slowed by a backlog. It records no access-to-information law, a main anticorruption agency without full prosecutorial powers, a penal code that lets police compel journalists to reveal sources, and the killing in 2023 of the radio presenter Ralikonelo Joki outside his station in Maseru. Customary law treats married women as minors under their husbands' guardianship, although the Land Act of 2010 allows women to hold land titles and a law of 2022 lets widows inherit their husbands' estates.

Who Lesotho stands with abroad

Lesotho joined the Commonwealth on independence in 1966 and is a member of the United Nations, the African Union and the Non-Aligned Movement. Its closest ties are regional and economic. It is a founding member of the Southern African Development Coordination Conference, formed in Lusaka in April 1980, which became SADC in 1992. It belongs to the Southern African Customs Union with Botswana, Namibia, South Africa and Eswatini, and to the Common Monetary Area, which ties the loti to the rand at par. The US Commercial Service records that it joined the African Continental Free Trade Area in November 2020, and the BTI that in October 2023 it signed the Tripartite Free Trade Agreement linking COMESA and SADC.

Its foreign policy has turned on South Africa. During apartheid Lesotho opposed the South African government publicly and gave asylum to refugees, and in the years before the 1986 coup South Africa virtually closed the land border over Lesotho's support for the African National Congress. South Africa led the SADC intervention of 1998, which critics said served its own water supply, and its deputy president led the SADC mediation of 2014. Other choices are on record: Lesotho broke relations with China and recognised Taiwan in 1990 before restoring ties with China, recognises the State of Palestine, recognised Kosovo from 2014 to 2018, and in 2019 signed the UN Treaty on the Prohibition of Nuclear Weapons.