Zimbabwe’s President Emmerson Mnangagwa, who took over when Robert Mugabe’s 37 years in power were ended by a military coup, has made clear he has no intention of limiting himself to a decade at the top. In July, he signed a constitutional amendment that extends the terms of the sitting president and parliament from five to seven years and postpones the next general election from 2028 to 2030. The amendment also ends direct presidential elections, meaning parliament instead of voters will choose the president.

Mnangagwa’s supporters maintain that the two-term presidential limit still holds and only the length of terms has changed, but a parliament empowered to choose the president could easily renew his mandate indefinitely without asking voters.

Zimbabwe fits a pattern spanning continents, in which presidents use constitutional amendments, courts and parliaments to stay in power beyond the limits originally set. These routes keep incumbents in office at a far lower international cost than leading a coup would bring. The pattern is playing out in Cameroon, Chad, Côte d’Ivoire, Djibouti, the Democratic Republic of the Congo (DRC), the Republic of the Congo and, across the ocean, El Salvador and Nicaragua. Presidents have lengthened terms, abolished term or age limits, written rivals out of the race and, in the boldest cases, removed voters from the equation altogether. Each of these manoeuvres has been backed by repression aimed at people who stand up for democracy.

Age and term limits erased

Djibouti’s President Ismaïl Omar Guelleh has held office since 1999, when he was handpicked to succeed his uncle, founding President Hassan Gouled Aptidon. His People’s Rally for Progress has ruled unchallenged since 1979, two years after independence from France. In October 2025, parliament voted unanimously to remove the presidential age limit of 75. Six months later, in April 2026, Guelleh, now 78, won a sixth consecutive term with an implausible 97.8 per cent of the vote. Most opposition parties boycotted the election. The timing left almost no room for legal challenge or public mobilisation, which was already deeply constrained in a country where civic space is closed.

In Chad, President Mahamat Idriss Déby came to power in 2021 after the death of his father, Idriss Déby Itno, and won a disputed election in May 2024. In October 2025, parliament abolished presidential term limits and lengthened terms from five to seven years. The government described these as ‘technical’ changes, while the opposition called them unconstitutional and civil society warned they legalised indefinite rule.

The Republic of the Congo offers a cautionary tale. A two-term limit and a 70-year age ceiling that would have barred President Denis Sassou Nguesso from running again were removed by referendum in 2015. In March 2026, the 82-year-old leader claimed a fifth term on an official 94.82 per cent of the vote. He’s ruled continuously since 1997, having first held power from 1979 to 1992.

El Salvador’s descent into electoral autocracy is a case study in autocratic legalism. President Nayib Bukele, who won a free and fair election in 2019, took apart democratic institutions step by step through constitutional manipulation. He used his party’s 2021 legislative supermajority to purge and replace the judges of the Supreme Court’s Constitutional Chamber and the Attorney General. The captured court promptly reinterpreted the constitutional ban on a president being re-elected for a second consecutive term, clearing the path for Bukele’s 2024 second-term landslide after a six-month leave of absence staged to satisfy the rules. Having changed the procedure for amending the constitution, Bukele’s party completed the capture of institutions in July 2025, when the Legislative Assembly abolished presidential term limits, lengthened terms to six years and brought the next election forward to 2027.

The DRC could be on a similar trajectory. In power since January 2019 after a contested vote and re-elected in December 2023 amid opposition claims of fraud, President Félix Tshisekedi is constitutionally barred from a third five-year term. He has, however, opened the door to extending his mandate by proposing a constitutional revision and raising the possibility of delaying the 2028 election. Parliament then drafted legislation allowing a constitutional referendum to be held if triggered by a ‘major dysfunction’ of state institutions. Lawmakers passed the bill in June, but Tshisekedi returned it to address Constitutional Court reservations. The National Assembly passed the revised measure on 23 October despite an opposition boycott, and it now returns to the Senate.

Although Tshisekedi still faces significant constitutional hurdles, including provisions that set strict legislative thresholds and forbid any change to term limits, civil society and the opposition C64 coalition see the referendum law as a calculated step towards indefinite rule.

Rivals off the ballot

In Côte d’Ivoire, the Constitutional Council dealt with the opposition. President Alassane Ouattara, in power since a disputed 2010 election that ended in armed conflict and the arrest of his rival, argued that a new constitution adopted by referendum in 2016 reset his term count to zero. The Council agreed, clearing him to run for a third term in 2020 and a fourth, aged 83, in 2025. Seven weeks before the 2025 vote, it struck several candidates off the ballot on grounds of forfeited nationality and prior criminal convictions. With no viable contenders left, Ouattara won the first round outright with around 90 per cent of the vote.

Nicaragua is going further, writing political exclusion into law. President Daniel Ortega first ruled in the 1980s, after the 1979 Sandinista revolution, was voted out in 1990 and returned to the presidency in 2007 after brokering a pact that lowered the threshold needed to win. Once back in power, he weaponised the legal system with the aim of never losing it again. A pliant Supreme Court struck down presidential term limits in 2009 and the regime systematically stripped rival parties of legal standing. In late 2020, lawmakers laid the groundwork for sweeping disqualifications through a Russian-style ‘foreign agents’ law and broad treason statutes that criminalised dissent. Invoking these laws ahead of the 2021 election, authorities jailed every viable challenger on fabricated charges, securing Ortega’s uncontested re-election. In January 2025, a constitutional overhaul stretched terms from five to six years and made his wife, Rosario Murillo, co-president.

This year, the regime went further still. On 19 July, Ortega declared that Nicaragua would hold no more elections. Within days, the National Assembly advanced a constitutional amendment to elevate national security and treason laws into supreme law, permanently barring anyone accused of being a ‘traitor to the homeland’ or of supporting foreign sanctions from standing for public office. The package also extends presidential and legislative terms to seven years and grants electoral authorities unchecked power to dissolve rival parties. Approved on first reading on 1 September, the changes need a second vote, due in January 2027, to take effect.

Voters out of the equation

The ultimate way to entrench power is to deprive voters of their say. Legal manipulation has done exactly that in Cameroon and Zimbabwe.

In Zimbabwe, where the ZANU-PF party has governed since 1980, the July 2026 amendment is designed to keep Mnangagwa, now 84, in office until at least 2030, after which a parliament his party dominates will choose the president. As well as ending direct presidential elections, the act added 10 presidential appointees to the Senate, shifted voter registration from the electoral commission to the Registrar-General and abolished the National Peace and Reconciliation Commission, which had been investigating massacres carried out in the 1980s when Mnangagwa was state security minister. The battle has shifted to the Constitutional Court, which by October had received five petitions against the changes.

Cameroon has sidelined voters in a different way. President Paul Biya, the world’s oldest head of state at 93 and in power since 1982, scrapped term limits in 2008 and claimed an eighth term in October 2025, then unleashed a lethal crackdown on opposition protests. In April, a joint parliamentary session voted 200 to 18 to reintroduce the vice-presidency. Appointed and dismissed at the president’s discretion, the vice-president automatically takes over for the remainder of any uncompleted term, overriding the constitutional requirement for an election between 20 and 120 days after a vacancy.

Opposition leader Maurice Kamto, of the Cameroon Renaissance Movement, called the law a ‘constitutional coup’, and the Social Democratic Front boycotted the vote. The law effectively hands Biya, who spends long periods abroad, the power to choose his successor.

Ongoing repression

Legal and constitutional manipulation relies on repression. Before, during and after rewriting the rules, autocratic presidents use state coercion against people who try to defend democratic practices.

In Zimbabwe, the state rolled out a sustained crackdown as it changed the constitution. In October 2025, a suspected arson attack gutted the seminar room of the Southern African Political Economy Series Trust, a regional think tank, hours before civil society figures were due to speak against the amendment. In February 2026, police shut down the inaugural meeting of the Constitutional Defenders Forum, citing public gathering regulations the organisers insist they’d complied with. On 1 March, men in balaclavas stormed the offices of the National Constitutional Assembly party in the capital, Harare, and beat its leader, Lovemore Madhuku, a constitutional law professor who was challenging the amendment in court. On 5 March, armed police surrounded the Harare law office of Tendai Biti, the Forum’s leader. The Forum reported assaults and death threats against him.

Human Rights Watch documented seven separate attacks on student leaders campaigning against the changes. Between late 2025 and early 2026, student organisers in Bindura, Bulawayo and Chinhoyi were abducted, tortured and handed to police, in one instance with instructions to find something to charge them with, while two student union leaders were jailed without bail on charges that included distributing flyers. Journalists covering the process were also targeted. At parliamentary hearings in Harare on 31 March, ZANU-PF loyalists trapped journalists inside the venue, forced reporters to delete footage of violence against activists and assaulted a journalist.

In Chad, Succès Masra, runner-up in the 2024 election, was sentenced to 20 years in prison two months before parliament abolished term limits. In the DRC, when the C64 coalition marched against the referendum law on 15 September, police fired teargas, arrested dozens across several cities and left an opposition politician dead during clashes in Kinshasa, the capital. In Côte d’Ivoire, authorities banned protests and public meetings other than campaign events after the Constitutional Council disqualified the main challengers. In El Salvador, Bukele’s party eliminated term limits under a years-long state of exception that suspends basic due process guarantees. Authorities have jailed tens of thousands without trial and suppressed civil society groups and independent journalists through arrest threats, criminalisation and surveillance.

An outdated rulebook

When soldiers removed Gabon’s president in August 2023, the African Union (AU) suspended the country the following day. None of the presidents who’ve changed the rules to stay in power, in several cases indefinitely, have faced anything comparable. By routing changes through courts and parliaments, they keep up an appearance of institutional continuity that spares them the suspension and sanctions a coup can bring, even though the outcome is much the same: that of placing a president beyond the reach of voters.

The AU has the rules it needs to respond. The African Charter on Democracy, Elections and Governance provides for sanctions when governments amend constitutions or legal instruments to stay in power, just as it does for a coup. In the 2022 Accra Declaration, AU states noted that a growing number of governments were manipulating democratic processes to modify or eliminate term limits, and condemned constitutional amendments designed to entrench incumbents.

In practice, the AU has suspended states only after military takeovers or, as in Côte d’Ivoire in 2010, when an incumbent has refused to leave office after losing an election, and has never sanctioned an incumbent for rewriting a constitution to extend their time in power. It didn’t even suspend Chad in 2021, when the army installed Mahamat Idriss Déby in his late father’s place in breach of the constitution’s succession rules, the first step in a process that led to the abolition of term limits.

Civil society, in trying to uphold democratic practices, pays the price of this failure, and each unanswered manoeuvre makes future abuses more likely. As long as a coup costs a country its seat at the AU while manipulating the rules costs nothing, presidents determined to stay in power will keep taking the easier path.

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