Sudan's politics: three uprisings and the coups that followed them

How Sudan's officers have taken power

Sudan came to independence with an elected parliament. Elections in November and December 1953 gave Ismail al-Azhari's National Unionist Party a majority, and on 19 December 1955 that parliament declared independence, which Britain and Egypt recognised on 1 January 1956. Britannica describes the parties of those years as loose alliances bound by personal interest and loyalty to religious factions.

The first coup came on the night of 16 to 17 November 1958. General Ibrahim Abboud, the army's commander in chief, dissolved every political party, banned assemblies, suspended newspapers for a time and put the state under a Supreme Council of the Armed Forces of 12 senior officers. The second, on 25 May 1969, was led by Colonel Gaafar Nimeiri and a group of young officers, who abolished parliament and outlawed every party except the Sudanese Socialist Union. A coup led by the Sudanese Communist Party held power for a few days in July 1971 before anti-communist units restored Nimeiri, who then made himself president of the state and the Socialist Union the only legal party.

The third, on 30 June 1989, removed the elected government of Prime Minister Sadiq al-Mahdi. Officers under Omar al-Bashir suspended the parties, introduced an Islamic legal code across the country and ruled through a Revolutionary Command Council for National Salvation that held legislative and executive power at once. On 16 October 1993 al-Bashir disbanded the council and named himself president, and in the 1996 election he was by law the only candidate. Sudan became a one-party state under the National Congress Party, which the ruling National Islamic Front had formed, and the party governed until 2019.

Failed attempts include a bloody one by the Ansar in 1976 and another on 21 September 2021, after which 40 officers were arrested. The Bertelsmann Transformation Index's 2026 report on Sudan calls the military "the most significant veto power in Sudan". The Congressional Research Service traces the war that began in 2023 to how the country has been ruled since independence, primarily by military regimes and central elites.

Who brought Sudan's military rulers down

Abboud fell first. In October 1964 students at the University of Khartoum met in defiance of a ban to condemn the regime's conduct in the south, and with most of its forces committed there the regime could not keep control of the demonstrations that followed. Abboud resigned as head of state, and a transitional government under Sirr al-Khatim al-Khalifah was appointed to govern under the provisional constitution of 1956. It held elections in April and May 1965, and Muhammad Ahmad Mahjoub of the Umma Party formed a coalition in June.

Nimeiri's fall began with a rise in prices. In March 1985 his government announced increases in the prices of basic necessities, at the request of the International Monetary Fund, with which it was negotiating. On 2 April eight unions called for a "general political strike until the abolition of the current regime". The next day demonstrations filled Khartoum and the main cities and the strike stopped the institutions and the economy. On 6 April a group of officers under Lieutenant General Abd ar Rahman Siwar adh Dhahab overthrew Nimeiri, who took refuge in Egypt, and three days later a Transitional Military Council of fifteen members took charge.

The third uprising started in Atbara on 19 December 2018, after the price of bread was tripled, and protesters there set fire to the local headquarters of the National Congress Party. The Sudanese Professionals Association, an umbrella of unions of doctors, engineers, teachers, lawyers, journalists and pharmacists, coordinated the marches, and neighbourhood resistance committees ran the civil disobedience. In January 2019 they and the opposition parties formed the Forces of Freedom and Change. The march of 6 April became a sit-in outside the army's headquarters, and on 11 April the army removed al-Bashir, suspended the constitution and dissolved both chambers of the National Legislature. Ahmed Awad Ibn Auf, the first chairman of the Transitional Military Council that took over, lasted a single day.

The Bertelsmann report credits trade unions and professional associations with organising the revolts against dictatorship in 1964, in 1985 and from 2018 to 2019. In 1985 and in 2019 officers made the final move against the ruler, and a military council then ran the transition or bargained over it.

How Sudan's constitutions have been written and set aside

The transitional government of 1964 governed under the provisional constitution of 1956. Between 1966 and 1969 a succession of governments could not agree on a permanent constitution, though the Umma Party and the National Unionist Party proposed an Islamic-oriented one in 1968, and Britannica lists the lack of a workable constitution among the grievances of the officers who seized power in May 1969. After the communist coup attempt of 1971 Nimeiri promised a permanent constitution and a National Assembly. In September 1983 he introduced sharia law, the measures known as the September laws.

Al-Bashir's government wrote its own. The constitution of 1998, the Bertelsmann report notes, ostensibly guaranteed freedom of religion while adopting Islam as the state religion and Islamic law as the source of legislation. In December 1999, after a power struggle with Hassan al-Turabi, the speaker of parliament, the president disbanded parliament, suspended the constitution and declared a national state of emergency by decree.

The Comprehensive Peace Agreement with the Sudan People's Liberation Movement, signed on 9 January 2005, produced the Interim Constitution of 2005, which added a co-vice president for the south and a National Legislature of two chambers, the National Assembly and the Council of States. The army suspended it on 11 April 2019, and the charter of August 2019 repealed it in its second article, together with the constitutions of the states.

That charter charged the transitional authorities with preparing a permanent constitution and holding a national constitutional conference before the transition ended. The Sudan Bar Association put forward a draft in 2022, and in March 2025 the Rapid Support Forces and their allies signed a transitional constitution of their own. The Bertelsmann report observes that every Sudanese constitution has included the separation of powers and that the principle has never been realised.

What the transitional charter built and left unbuilt

The Constitutional Charter for the Transitional Period was negotiated between the Transitional Military Council and the Forces of Freedom and Change after 3 June 2019, when security forces cleared the sit-in and more than 100 people were thought to have been killed. It was signed in August, the military council was dissolved on 20 August, and Article 7 fixed the transition at thirty-nine months.

Who sat on the Sovereignty Council

The Sovereignty Council was a collective head of state with supreme command of the armed forces, the Rapid Support Forces and the other uniformed forces, and it had eleven members: five civilians chosen by the Forces of Freedom and Change, five chosen by the military council, and an eleventh civilian chosen by both. A member selected by the military side was to chair it for the first 21 months, and a civilian for the remaining 18, from 17 May 2021. The Forces of Freedom and Change chose the prime minister, who appointed up to twenty ministers from the coalition's list, except the ministers of defence and the interior, whom the council's military members nominated. No member of either body could stand in the general election that was to close the transition.

Article 35 put both armed bodies in a single clause. The armed forces and the Rapid Support Forces were "a national military institution", subordinate to the General Commander of the Armed Forces, with a separate law to govern each one's relationship with the executive. The two forces that clause named went to war with each other in April 2023.

Why the legislative council was never formed

Article 24 of the 2019 charter provided for a Transitional Legislative Council of no more than 300 members, at least 40% of them women, with 67% chosen by the Forces of Freedom and Change and 33% by other forces, and with members of the National Congress Party excluded. It was to be formed within 90 days of signature and it could not be dissolved. Until it existed, the Sovereignty Council and the cabinet were to exercise its powers in joint session, deciding by consensus or by a two-thirds majority. The charter itself could be amended only by two-thirds of the members of that council.

Freedom House records that disputes over a civilian-led government and then the war delayed the council, and that it had still not been established at the end of 2025. A draft law for an electoral commission, put to public consultation in September 2021, was not enacted, and the Constitutional Court had been dormant since the terms of its last members expired in 2020. An amendment of November 2020 incorporated the Juba Peace Agreement, signed that October with armed movements of the Sudan Revolutionary Front, and restarted the transitional period from its date. Britannica records that the handover of the Sovereignty Council's chair to a civilian was approaching when the army took power on 25 October 2021.

How the last coup became a war between governments

The army led the coup of 25 October 2021, backed by the Rapid Support Forces and by leaders of armed movements that had signed the Juba agreement. It arrested the cabinet, dismissed the civilian members of the Sovereignty Council and declared a state of emergency, and its commander, Abdel Fattah al-Burhan, called the takeover a "corrective action". The African Union suspended Sudan again. An agreement of 21 November 2021 reinstated Abdalla Hamdok as prime minister on the basis of the 2019 charter, and he resigned on 2 January 2022. Freedom House records that al-Burhan dissolved all trade unions and professional associations after the coup, and by March 2022 more than 1,000 people had been detained for opposing it and 87 had been killed.

A framework agreement signed in December 2022 between the military and civilian groups was to lead to a new transitional government, and it included reform of the security sector. The two generals fell out over that reform, over the chain of command above all, and fighting began in Khartoum on 15 April 2023.

The government and its ministries moved to Port Sudan on the Red Sea, which the Congressional Research Service called the country's interim capital in 2025, and returned to Khartoum on 11 January 2026, ten months after the army retook the city. In February 2025 the RSF and allied groups, among them the faction of the SPLM-North led by Abdelaziz al-Hilu, signed a founding charter in Nairobi for a rival government, and in August that government, based in Nyala in Darfur, installed the RSF commander as its head of state. The African Union and the United Nations Security Council denounced the steps. On the army's side, a prime minister was appointed in May 2025, the first since January 2022.

The Bertelsmann report's example of citizens caught between two administrations is money. In December 2024 the Central Bank of Sudan introduced a new currency to keep cash away from the RSF, and carrying the old notes became an offence in areas the army held, while in RSF areas a person found with the new notes could be tortured and killed. UNHCR counted 6,409,546 people displaced inside Sudan on 20 September 2026.

Who organises Sudanese politics outside the army

The two oldest parties grew out of religious orders. The Umma Party came from the Ansar, the movement of the Mahdi's followers, and the unionists from the Khatmiyya brotherhood, whose faction around al-Azhari was remodelled as the National Unionist Party in 1951. Britannica writes that these sectarian religious elites virtually controlled the parties until the last decade of the 20th century. Sadiq al-Mahdi, the Mahdi's great-grandson, was the prime minister the coup of 1989 removed. Both parties have since split into smaller ones.

The Muslim Brotherhood reached Sudan from Egypt in the 1940s, and the Islamist movement it started divided in 1999 into the National Congress Party, which governed, and al-Turabi's Popular Congress Party, which went into opposition. The Communist Party, the Islamists' main rival, is active among workers and in the professional unions, and the Republican Party campaigns for a secular political system. The Sudan People's Liberation Movement fought governments from 1983 and became a party under the agreement of 2005, and the northern branch it left behind in 2011 has since divided into three parties and armed groups.

Opposition coalitions have rarely held; the National Democratic Alliance and Sudan Call both broke up over political differences. The Forces of Freedom and Change later lost the Communist Party and the Professionals Association, and in the Bertelsmann report's account a split among its armed groups, which formed the FFC-Democratic Alliance, paved the way for the coup of 2021. After the antiwar coalition Taqadum signed an agreement with the RSF in Addis Ababa in January 2024, the general prosecutor ordered the arrest of its leaders in April, accusing them of "undermining the constitution and committing war crimes".

The last election was the general election of 2015, and al-Bashir had been re-elected in 2010 while under an international arrest warrant. Freedom House found that civilian parties had effectively been unable to operate in Sudan since April 2023, and its 2026 report scored the country minus 4 of a possible 40 for political rights and 5 of 60 for civil liberties, 1 of 100 overall against 2 the year before. The Arab Barometer found in 2019 that 42% of Sudanese said democracy was preferable to any other system of government. Since 2023 the resistance committees have run Emergency Response Rooms, which evacuate people, keep hospitals running and feed families from community kitchens.

How Khartoum has governed Sudan's states

From 1983 to 1997 the country was divided into five regions in the north and three in the south, each headed by a military governor, and the regional assemblies were suspended after the coup of 1989. In 1997 the regions gave way to 26 states. The president appointed their executives, cabinets and senior officials, and their limited budgets were set and paid out from Khartoum, which kept them dependent on the centre. The International Organization for Migration counted 18 states and 189 localities when it tracked displacement in October 2023.

Peace agreements added a second layer. The Darfur Peace Agreement of 5 May 2006 created a Darfur Regional Government, the agreement signed with the Eastern Front in Asmara on 14 October 2006 a coordinating council for the three eastern states, and the Abyei Area has an administration of its own. Under the Juba agreement of 2020, the leaders of two Darfur movements were appointed governor of Darfur and minister of finance in 2021. The 2019 charter described a decentralised state with federal, state and local levels, and kept the existing system until the division of powers could be re-examined.

In the Bertelsmann report's account, services and development have been concentrated in Khartoum and the north and centre, Darfur, Kordofan and Blue Nile have been left underserved, and citizenship in post-colonial Sudan has worked through an ethnic hierarchy biased toward groups from the north and centre. Members of the RSF and its sympathisers call the present war one against "the 1956 state" on those grounds. During the war, the report adds, the government has refused to renew the passports of political opponents.

Who Sudan's governments have stood with abroad

Abboud's government signed an agreement with Egypt on the Nile waters on 8 November 1959. Britain trained and supplied the army until relations were cut after the war of 1967, the Soviet Union and the Eastern Bloc armed it from 1968 to 1971, and from the mid-1970s Western countries supplied it again. United States aid rose from US$5 million in 1979 to US$254 million in 1985, mainly for military programmes.

Under al-Bashir, al-Turabi invited Osama bin Laden to Sudan in the 1990s, the United States listed the country as a state sponsor of terrorism, and Uganda, Kenya and Ethiopia formed a "Front Line States" alliance with American support to check the National Islamic Front. The International Criminal Court issued a warrant for al-Bashir's arrest over Darfur in 2009. In 2015 Sudan joined the Saudi-led intervention in Yemen, where the RSF was deployed. The transitional government agreed in October 2020 to normalise relations with Israel, and on 14 December 2020 the United States removed Sudan from its terrorism list after Sudan agreed to pay US$335 million in compensation to victims of the 1998 embassy bombings.

The African Union suspended Sudan in June 2019, lifted the suspension on 6 September 2019 once the civilian-led cabinet was in place, and suspended it again after the coup of October 2021. On 16 January 2024 the government suspended its ties with the Intergovernmental Authority on Development, accusing it of violating Sudan's sovereignty. Sudan disputes the Halaib Triangle with Egypt, which administers it, and the Abyei Area with South Sudan, and this catalogue records both disputes without taking a position.

Outside powers have taken sides in the war. The Bertelsmann report records Egyptian support for the army in fighter aircraft, pilots and training, and Russia discussed a naval base north of Port Sudan with the army in 2024. The army's government accuses the United Arab Emirates of arming the RSF; a United Nations expert report of January 2024 found that the UAE was providing military support, and the UAE denies the allegations. The army stayed away from talks in Geneva in August 2024, and in January 2025 the United States declared that members of the RSF and allied militias had committed genocide and sanctioned the commanders of both forces.