Culled from Daily Update99
The Cameroonian presidential election of October 2025 is already shaping up to be tense. One of the active figures on the national scene, Abdouraman Babba Hamadou, has just taken a new step by filing an appeal with the Constitutional Council, with the aim of securing the right for all political parties to present a candidate, regardless of their parliamentary or territorial presence.
This appeal follows a silence from the ELECAM Electoral Council, which, according to Abdouraman, did not respond to his request of May 23, 2025. Faced with what he considers a democratic obstacle, he brought the matter before the highest constitutional court on June 20, 2025. He challenges paragraph 2 of article 121 of the Electoral Code , which he considers to be both legally unwritten and inapplicable in the Cameroonian context.
The main argument rests on an institutional reality that is difficult to dispute: no political party, to date, is fully represented in the National Assembly, the Senate and the Regional Councils at the same time. Requiring this triple representation for the investiture of a candidate would, in fact, exclude the majority of political groups from the presidential election. A situation which, according to the applicant, violates the basic principles of representative democracy.
The appeal thus aims to obtain a more inclusive interpretation of the electoral text in order to allow each legally constituted party to propose a candidate, regardless of its previous electoral results. In a context where access to elections remains a central issue, this approach could have significant repercussions on political pluralism and democratic transparency in Cameroon.
Abdouraman Babba Hamadou promises to keep the public informed of the progress of this procedure. Less than four months before the election, this initiative lays a new stone in the debate on the legitimacy of the rules of the electoral game in Cameroon.
