São Tomé and Príncipe's politics: a government with two masters

How the single-party state ended in São Tomé

The political and judicial structures adopted at independence on 12 July 1975 were those of a single-party state modelled on the Soviet example, in Britannica's description, although the regime never formally proclaimed itself Marxist-Leninist. The Movement for the Liberation of São Tomé and Príncipe, the MLSTP, had agreed the transfer of sovereignty with Portugal's representatives in Algiers in November 1974, and its secretary general, Manuel Pinto da Costa, became the first president.

The constitution in force today is still that document. Its closing articles date it to 5 November 1975, when it was approved at a joint meeting of the MLSTP's Political Bureau and the assembly then being set up, and list five revisions since: constitutional laws of 1980, 1982 and 1987, a fourth revision published on 20 September 1990, and a fifth published on 29 January 2003.

The 1990 revision is the one that changed the regime. Economic decline and popular dissatisfaction had started a liberalisation in 1985, and the new text established a multiparty system. Shortly after it took effect the National Assembly formally legalised opposition parties, and independent candidates were allowed to stand in the legislative elections of January 1991.

Those elections moved power at once. The Party of Democratic Convergence won a majority of seats and the MLSTP became a vocal minority. Miguel Trovoada, a former prime minister in exile since 1986, returned as an independent and was elected president unopposed. The close ties with eastern Europe and Cuba gave way to improved relations with Portugal, France and other Western governments.

Why the government answers to two masters

Article 113 is a single sentence. The government, it says, "is politically responsible before the President of the Republic and the National Assembly." Article 114 divides the same idea by person: the prime minister is accountable to the president and, within the government's collective responsibility, to the Assembly.

Each body holds a lever. The Assembly can end a government by rejecting its programme, which the prime minister must present within thirty days of appointment, by refusing a vote of confidence, or by passing a motion of no confidence with an absolute majority of the deputies in office. The president's lever is Article 117(2), which reaches beyond those parliamentary routes: the president "may dismiss the Government when this is necessary to ensure the regular functioning of democratic institutions, after consulting the Council of State."

The same constitution sets a harder test for the president's other lever. Dissolving the National Assembly requires a "severe institutional crisis", and the decree is legally non-existent without a favourable opinion from the Council of State. Dissolution is also barred in the twelve months after an election, in the last six months of a presidential term and while a state of siege or emergency is in force. Dismissing the government needs consultation and nothing more, so a president at odds with the Assembly has an easier route to a new cabinet than to a new chamber.

Appointment runs through both bodies as well. The president names the prime minister after consulting the parties represented in the Assembly and in view of the election results, and Article 81 adds the Assembly's consent. Ministers and secretaries of state are appointed by the president on the prime minister's proposal.

Who sits on the Council of State

The council that both levers pass through meets in private and is chaired by the president. Its members are the President of the National Assembly, the prime minister, the President of the Constitutional Court, the Attorney-General, the President of the Regional Government of Príncipe, every former president who was not removed from office, three citizens appointed by the president and three elected by the Assembly in proportion to its parties. When the question before it is the dismissal of a government, the prime minister of that government is one of the people being consulted.

What the president decides alone

The list of presidential powers is short. The president is head of state and supreme commander of the armed forces, sets the dates of presidential, legislative, regional and local elections, may call a national referendum, grants pardons after consulting the government, and appoints one judge of the Constitutional Court and, on the government's proposal, the Attorney-General. A bill the Assembly passes must be promulgated within 15 days. If the president declines, a qualified majority of deputies can confirm it and the president then has eight days to sign. A decree of the government left unsigned for twenty days is legally non-existent.

Eligibility is narrow. A candidate must be a Santomean citizen of origin, older than 35, with no other nationality and three years of permanent residence immediately before standing; a prime minister must also hold no other nationality. The president is elected by outright majority, in a second round if needed, for five years. A third consecutive term is barred, and so is a return in the five years after a second term ends. A president who resigns cannot stand in the next election.

Wikipedia's history of the country calls the president "largely ceremonial", with political power lying with the prime minister. The dismissal clause is the reason that reading has been tested.

Why cohabitation produced so many short governments

The two-master arrangement was first tested hard after 2001. Fradique de Menezes, a businessman backed by Independent Democratic Action (ADI), won the presidential election in the first round and was inaugurated on 3 September 2001. Within months, Britannica records, a power struggle broke out between the new president and a National Assembly dominated by the renamed MLSTP-Social Democratic Party, the MLSTP-PSD.

Parliamentary elections in March 2002 left the conflict in place. For the next four years a series of short-lived, opposition-led governments followed one another. The period is called cohabitation in the sources, and it ended in March 2006, when a coalition supporting the president won enough Assembly seats to form a government. De Menezes won a second term in the presidential election of 30 July 2006 against two opponents, one of them Patrice Trovoada, the son of the former president.

The fifth revision of the constitution was published on 29 January 2003, in the middle of that period, and it carries an unusual transitional clause. The three articles setting out the president's powers, Articles 80, 81 and 82, "shall come into force on the date on which the next elected President of the Republic takes office", and a single substitute article governed until then. A revision passed while the presidency and the Assembly were in open conflict deferred its changes to the presidency until after the next presidential election.

What happened each time soldiers took power

Four episodes involving the armed forces are on record since 1991, and the first two ended the same way. In August 1995 the military deposed Trovoada in a bloodless coup. Faced with the immediate threat of losing foreign aid, in Britannica's account, the coup leaders reconsidered their demands and Trovoada was reinstated as president a week later. He won re-election in 1996.

On 16 July 2003 the army, led by Major Fernando "Cobo" Pereira, seized power, complaining of corruption and that forthcoming oil revenues would not be divided fairly. It held power for a week. International negotiations produced an accord that returned de Menezes to office, on the condition that the coup leaders would not be punished.

On 12 February 2009 an attempt to overthrow de Menezes failed. The plotters were imprisoned and later pardoned by the president they had tried to remove, using a power the constitution gives the head of state after consulting the government.

The fourth episode was handled differently. On 25 November 2022, two weeks after a new prime minister took office, security forces put down an assault on military barracks that the government described as an attempted coup; Euronews reported four assailants killed. A former presidential candidate was among those detained. In August 2024 the Supreme Court of Justice upheld a 15-year prison sentence, handed down in late 2023, against the only surviving suspect. Seven members of the military, detained separately over the torture and murder of others involved in the attack, were still awaiting a military trial at the end of 2024, according to Freedom House.

The forces behind these episodes are small. Wikipedia lists four branches, the army, the coast guard, the presidential guard and a national guard; Britannica lists the first three. Portugal, Angola and the United States have provided technical and training assistance.

Why a president dismissed his own party's government

Legislative elections in September 2022 gave ADI 30 of the 55 seats, according to the World Bank, and Patrice Trovoada was appointed prime minister on 11 November 2022 by a president elected in 2021 as ADI's candidate. President and prime minister belonged to the same party.

On 6 January 2025 the president dismissed the government by decree. The statement cited the government's "inability" to address the country's problems, economic and financial among them, and the prime minister's "prolonged absences", and gave ADI 72 hours to form a new administration. ADI announced the next day that it would appeal to the Constitutional Court.

Trovoada set out his objection to The Africa Report, and it rests on the articles above. "We operate under a parliamentary system," he said. A prime minister, in his reading, can be removed only where democratic institutions are not functioning, and only after the Council of State has been consulted; in this case, he said, the council was consulted after the fact. He also argued that the president has no authority to choose the prime minister, because the party that wins the legislative election forms the government.

The replacement followed the party's list. ADI put forward one candidate, whom the president rejected, and then three more, from whom the president chose the justice minister, Ilza Amado Vaz. She held the office from 9 January 2025 until a further appointment on 12 January.

Both positions are readings of one text. Article 117(2) gives the president a power of dismissal outside the parliamentary routes, and it ties that power to the regular functioning of democratic institutions and to consultation of the Council of State. Whether those conditions were met in January 2025 is the substance of the dispute, and the president and the dismissed prime minister answered it in opposite ways.

How elections have moved power between parties

Freedom House, in Freedom in the World 2025, describes regular, competitive elections and multiple transfers of power between rival parties. It scored the country 35 of 40 for political rights and 49 of 60 for civil liberties, 84 of 100 in all, with a status of Free. Its lowest marks, 2 of 4, went to safeguards against official corruption, to personal social freedoms and to equality of opportunity. The World Bank's country overview calls the country "a model for the democratic transition of power in Central Africa".

Two of those results turned on counting and courts. In the presidential election of 17 July 2016, Evaristo Carvalho of ADI first appeared to have won outright with 50.1%. Late-arriving ballots from absentee voters and from areas where polling had been delayed brought his share down to 49.88%, which forced a runoff. Pinto da Costa, the incumbent, boycotted it, citing irregularities in the first round, and Carvalho won on 7 August 2016. In 2021 nineteen candidates stood, and a legal challenge to the first-round result by the third-placed candidate, Delfim Neves, moved the runoff from 8 August to 5 September.

The Assembly itself has 55 members, elected for four years by proportional representation in seven multi-member constituencies, and it meets twice a year. The constitution leaves its size to ordinary law and states that deputies "represent all the people, and not just the electoral circles by which they are elected." Amendments need two thirds of the deputies in office, and a revision can begin five years after the last one, or at any time with a three-quarters majority. Nine matters cannot be revised at all, among them multiparty pluralism, the separation of powers and the autonomy of regional and local power.

The African Development Bank's outlook of June 2026 lists the 2026 election cycle among the risks to public finances, warning that it could bring forward visible public projects and delay structural reforms.

Who rules on what the constitution means

Under the 2003 text the Constitutional Court has five judges, all appointed by the National Assembly, three of them drawn from serving magistrates and two from other jurists, for five-year terms; the judges elect their own president. The court is the last instance on the validity of elections, rules on the legality of political parties, verifies the death or incapacity of a president, and reviews referendums before they are held. Until it was set up, the Supreme Court of Justice exercised its functions with five judges, one of them appointed by the president and one elected by a two-thirds vote of the Assembly.

The judiciary as a whole was once responsible to the National Assembly and is independent under the current constitution. The Ordem dos Advogados, the lawyers' association, was created in 2006.

The institutions around the courts were busy in 2024, in Freedom House's account. In April the Superior Council of the Judiciary cancelled the appointment of eight new judges after the government and members of the Assembly objected to the recruitment process, and the candidates warned of political interference. In May the Court of Auditors reported that most public institutions, the presidency among them, had not submitted their 2023 accounts for review. In June the Constitutional Court created a commission to monitor the accounts of political parties and election campaigns. Freedom House set those steps against pressure from the International Monetary Fund, whose Extended Credit Facility arrangement was under way by 2025; an IMF staff team visited from 22 to 26 September 2025 ahead of the programme's second review.

What autonomy means for the island of Príncipe

The country's political geography has been redrawn twice. In 1977 it was divided into two provinces, São Tomé and Príncipe, and six districts. The 1990 constitution abolished the provinces, and the districts became the only subdivisions: there are now seven, six on São Tomé and one, Pagué, covering Príncipe.

Since 29 April 1995 Príncipe has also been an autonomous region, the only one in the country. Article 137 makes the island and the islets around it an Autonomous Region "with political and administrative statutes of their own, taking their specific nature into account", governed by a Regional Assembly and a Regional Government. The president of that regional government sits on the Council of State beside the prime minister and the President of the National Assembly, and the autonomy of regional and local power is on the list of provisions no revision may touch.

Local government below that runs through district assemblies elected by direct and secret ballot, each with a district council as its executive. The constitution sets their mandate at three years and allows it to be revoked by popular initiative; Wikipedia's politics article gives five years for the district councils. Municipal elections in late 1992 gave the MLSTP a majority on five of the seven councils, and the next local elections took until 27 August 2006, the first since 1992.

Príncipe's place in the state is older than the republic. In 1753, because of frequent unrest on São Tomé, the colonial capital moved to Santo António on Príncipe, and São Tomé city became the capital again only in 1852.

Who São Tomé and Príncipe stands with abroad

The country is a founding member of the Community of Portuguese Language Countries, and its record also lists the United Nations, the African Union, the Economic Community of Central African States, the Alliance of Small Island States, the Group of 77 and the Organisation of African, Caribbean and Pacific States. It joined the Organisation internationale de la Francophonie in 1999. It keeps embassies in Angola, Belgium, Gabon, Portugal and the United States, and a permanent mission to the United Nations in New York.

Portugal and Angola are the two governments the sources name as closest. Under an agreement between the two states, Portugal patrols the coastal waters of São Tomé and Príncipe, with the Portuguese naval ship NRP Zaire and patrol boats stationed there, and a new defence cooperation agreement signed in September 2022 extended training and maritime security. Portugal also helps fund the public university. Angola is the main supplier of oil and natural gas.

Relations with the United States date from 1975. A long-term agreement signed in 1992 set up a Voice of America relay station on São Tomé that broadcasts to much of Africa, and a plan for a small American military base, accepted by the government in 2002, was cancelled for reasons on the American side.

São Tomé and Príncipe recognised the People's Republic of China in 2016, and Chinese investment in road and seaport projects dates from 2013. In 2017 it signed the United Nations Treaty on the Prohibition of Nuclear Weapons. The external money that ended the coup of 1995 still shapes domestic politics: Freedom House ties the anti-corruption measures of 2024 to the conditions of renewed IMF assistance, and the World Bank's overview records declining official development assistance among the strains on public finances.