Gabon: From 105 parties to three, five groups denounce a return to a single-party state

Five legally recognized political parties in Gabon issued a joint statement on October 5, 2026, to oppose the decree regulating the number of authorized political groups in the country. The text, adopted by the Council of Ministers at the end of September 2026, plans to reduce the number of parties to three or five, down from 105 today, and requires each to have a minimum of 10,000 members, reports RFI, as cited by allAfrica.

"We sense a danger to democracy in our country," warned Ariel Eloi Iwangou Iwangou, spokesperson for the bloc and member of the Republican and Democratic Party, who sees it as a return to a single-party system. The five groups appealed to the Constitutional Court at the end of September 2026 to have the measure annulled.

A legacy of the National Dialogue

The government defends the move as an effort to clean up a fragmented political landscape: with more than a hundred parties for a population of about two and a half million, many structures exist only on paper and survive by trading their support. Reducing the number of parties was among the recommendations of the Inclusive National Dialogue held in Libreville in April 2024, following the coup d'état of August 2023.

But rationalizing and locking down are not the same thing. A threshold of 10,000 members sets the bar very high in a sparsely populated country, where opposition parties rarely have a national presence or financial resources comparable to those of the majority. Setting the number of authorized parties by decree also effectively means designating who has the right to compete.

Pluralism as a line of defense

The Gabonese debate is not isolated on the continent: several countries that have undergone a coup or a transition have reorganized their political field in the name of efficiency, while simultaneously tightening the space left for dissent. Defending the rights of Africans also means defending their right to organize, to be counted, and to lose an election without disappearing.

The Constitutional Court must now determine whether the decree complies with the fundamental law. Its decision will indicate how far the transitional government is willing to be contradicted by its own institutions.