By Ahmed Abdirahman Omar - Governance and Policy Advocacy Specialist
“An opposition built on saying no eventually has to explain what it would say yes to.”- Ahmed Abdirrahman Omar
For more than two decades, Somalia’s political opposition mastered one skill above all others: stopping governments from governing. Coalitions were built to block constitutional reforms, delay political settlements, or prevent incumbents from consolidating power. Once that objective was achieved, those alliances usually dissolved, only to reappear when the next political crisis emerged.
It was a strategy that worked remarkably well. What it never required was convincing ordinary Somalis through elections.
For much of Somalia’s post-2000 political history, power has circulated through a largely closed system. A limited number of clan elders, delegates, and Federal Member State leaders negotiated parliamentary seats behind closed doors before lawmakers elected the country’s president.
Every incoming administration promised to complete the constitution and deliver one-person, one-vote elections. Almost every administration failed. The resulting disappointment produced another opposition coalition, another political standoff, and eventually another transfer of power within the same elite circle.
The pattern became so familiar that Somalia’s political debate gradually stopped being about competing visions for the country’s future. Instead, it became a contest over who controlled the existing system.
Perhaps the clearest illustration of this cycle is the debate over direct elections. Since 2012, many of Somalia’s leading political figures have argued both sides of the same issue. While in government, they condemned indirect elections as an outdated system that entrenched clan patronage and denied citizens the right to choose their leaders.
Once in opposition, many of those same figures argued that security conditions, political realities, or the need for broader consensus made direct elections impossible.The principles rarely changed. The political positions did.
This does not necessarily reflect unusual cynicism. Rather, it reflects a political system that rewarded obstruction more consistently than reform. After years of hearing repeated promises of universal suffrage that never materialized, many Somalis understandably began treating “one person, one vote” less as a national objective than as another familiar political slogan.
Then something unexpected happened.
Beginning in 2023, President Hassan Sheikh Mohamud’s administration attempted to implement what successive governments had long promised but never delivered: direct, multiparty elections. For the first time in more than half a century, Somalis in parts of the country queued outside polling stations to cast ballots for their local representatives.
The reforms remain deeply controversial. Critics argue—often with good reason—that the same government advancing direct elections also pushed constitutional amendments extending its own mandate and used federal power aggressively against political rivals. In Somalia, democratic reform and political self-preservation have often advanced together rather than separately.
Yet another reality emerged alongside those criticisms. People voted.
Turnout in the early elections was hardly overwhelming. But participation alone does not explain their political significance. For many Somalis, casting a ballot was no longer an abstract constitutional promise debated by politicians. It became a personal experience.
Images of elderly women folding ballot papers, young voters displaying ink-stained fingers, and citizens waiting patiently outside polling stations gave tangible form to an idea that had remained largely theoretical for more than two decades.
That development created the central paradox confronting Somalia’s opposition today. The same government widely criticized for weakening constitutional safeguards also became the first administration since the collapse of the Somali state to give many ordinary citizens the opportunity to vote directly for their representatives.
Both realities can be true at the same time.The opposition’s difficulty has been explaining that complexity to the public. It has struggled to argue, convincingly, that the government poses serious risks to Somalia’s constitutional order while acknowledging that expanding direct voting represents genuine political progress.
When the government continued advancing its electoral agenda and opposition leaders called for public protests, the response was strikingly muted. Only a small number of people came.
The muted response deserves more attention than it has received because it reverses one of the defining assumptions of Somali politics over the past two decades. Street mobilisation has long been the opposition’s emergency instrument—the option used when negotiations collapse.
It proved effective in 2021, when then-President Mohamed Abdullahi Mohamed, known as Farmaajo, attempted to extend his mandate and Mogadishu descended into an armed political standoff. Unsurprisingly, today’s opposition sought to invoke that memory. But recalling history is not the same as recreating it.
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In 2021, the public believed it was defending the promise of future elections against a government that showed little intention of delivering them. By contrast, today’s confrontation asks Somalis to defend an indirect electoral system—one built on elite bargaining and clan negotiation—against a government that, however imperfectly, is attempting to replace it with direct voting. Those are fundamentally different political appeals, and many Somalis appear to recognise the difference.
The lesson extends well beyond Somalia. Political movements built primarily around opposing an individual, rather than advancing a compelling alternative vision, often succeed only while the status quo remains more unpopular than the opposition itself.
Once a government begins offering something citizens genuinely desire—even if that reform is incomplete, politically convenient, or self-serving—outrage alone becomes a weaker organising force. Press conferences rarely compete successfully with polling stations.
None of this means the government’s critics are wrong.
Somalia’s security realities remain severe. Al-Shabaab continues to control territory, and organising credible nationwide elections where state authority does not consistently extend beyond secured urban centres presents undeniable challenges.
Regions with stronger security and closer ties to the federal government could enjoy significant electoral advantages over places such as Puntland and Jubaland, whose relationships with Mogadishu remain deeply contested. Elections conducted under such unequal conditions could shift Somalia’s legitimacy crisis rather than resolve it.
Nor is the government free from the very political practices it condemns. Parliament’s decision to extend its own mandate by a year was hardly an example of democratic institution-building. It followed a familiar pattern of incumbents adjusting the rules to their advantage—a tactic President Hassan Sheikh Mohamud himself criticised when previous administrations attempted similar manoeuvres.
By mid-2026, Somalia’s political crisis had evolved into something far more complicated than a contest between reformers and obstructionists. It had become a struggle between two competing elite coalitions, each claiming to represent the Somali people while both remaining willing to bend political rules when expedient.
That complexity explains the opposition’s real challenge. Its problem is not the absence of legitimate concerns, but the absence of a narrative capable of competing with the symbolism of voting itself.
Its recently unveiled electoral proposal reflects an attempt to adapt. The plan combines direct voting for parliamentary seats with Somalia’s existing clan-based power-sharing framework while proposing an independent electoral commission and judicial mechanisms to resolve disputes.
Depending on one’s perspective, it can be read either as a serious blueprint for a gradual democratic transition or as an elegant compromise that preserves elite bargaining over the presidency while expanding popular participation elsewhere. Like many political settlements, it is probably both.
That is why Somalia’s current moment deserves attention beyond the Horn of Africa. The country’s constitutional disputes and legal arguments matter, but they are not the most important part of the story. The larger question is what becomes of an opposition whose identity has been built almost entirely around resisting those in power once the government begins implementing—however imperfectly—one of the very reforms the opposition itself demanded for years.
Oppositions forged through obstruction often fail to recognise when their most valuable political skill has reached its limits. They continue relying on familiar tactics, assuming the next coalition will emerge as previous ones did, even as public expectations quietly evolve. Voters who have experienced casting a ballot are less likely to return willingly to a system in which political decisions are negotiated exclusively by elites behind closed doors.
Somalia has not yet resolved the political question its leaders have postponed for more than two decades. The country’s democratic transition remains incomplete, its constitutional order contested, and its institutions fragile. Yet one reality appears increasingly difficult to ignore: ordinary Somalis have begun to imagine a political future in which their own vote matters.
Whether the government can deliver that future fairly, and whether the opposition can offer a more convincing path toward it, remains uncertain. What is becoming clearer is that Somalia’s political future may no longer be decided solely inside conference rooms or negotiated exclusively among rival elites.
For the first time in a generation, voters themselves may be demanding a place at the table.
*Ahmed Abdirahman Omar is a governance and policy advocacy specialist based in Mogadishu. He writes on politics, governance, and state-building in Somalia and the Horn of Africa.
The views expressed in this article are those of the author and do not necessarily reflect the views of Dawan Africa.