How To Rig an Election Without Breaking the Law
Cameroon's 2025 presidential race as a masterclass in electoral autocracy, and a symptom of an ideal Potemkin Democracy
On October 12, 2025, the people of Cameroon are scheduled to go to the polls. It will look like a democracy in action, but for only the cameras. There will be multiple candidates, campaign posters, and international observers, for something less of an election, and more of a ritual. The final scene in a long, carefully scripted play designed to confirm the power of 92-year-old President Paul Biya, a man who has already been in charge for 42 years.
Cameroon is a perfect case study, if you are particularly interested in modern expressions of authoritarianism. It’s an electoral autocracy, a hybrid regime in which democratic institutions are imitative and adhere to authoritarian methods. In these regimes, regular elections are held, but they are accused of failing to reach democratic standards of freedom and fairness. In our case, the system has mastered the art of maintaining a democratic façade while gutting its substance. In effect, the Biya regime doesn’t need to crudely stuff ballot boxes on election day, because it has spent decades ensuring the game is already won. The real work of rigging an election happens in plain sight, often using the very tools of democracy—laws, courts, and commissions—to strangle it.
Eliminate the Competition
This year’s election will showcase the regime’s most effective tactics. The central controversy is the disqualification of Maurice Kamto, Biya’s most popular and threatening rival. Kamto, who came second in the disputed 2018 election, has been barred from running by both the electoral commission (ELECAM) and the Constitutional Council. The official reason? A procedural technicality about his party’s sponsorship.
Political assassination by paperwork disguised as “legal dispute”. An old strategy of legal repression, where opponents are not thrown in jail as often as they are neutralized by a labyrinth of arbitrary rules. The regime has weaponized the law to eliminate its chief rival before the race even begins. The fight is over long before the bell has rung.
Changing the Rules to Stay in Power
See this as just one play from a well-worn book. The foundation of Biya’s enduring power was laid in 2008, when his party, the Cameroon’s People Democratic Movement (CPDM), used its legislative majority to amend the constitution and remove presidential term limits. An act constitutional engineering granting Biya the right to rule for life, moving the goalposts in a game only he could win.
The system is also designed to exploit the opposition's morbid division, its greatest weakness. Cameroon’s electoral law has no provision for a runoff. This built-in, deliberate, and structural flaw allows for an incumbent to win with a simple plurality, even if the majority of the country votes against them. In the landmark 1992 election, the combined opposition vote far exceeded Biya’s, but because they were split between multiple candidates, Biya squeaked through with just under 40%. The regime has thrived on this strategic fragmentation ever since, convinced that a disunited opposition will reliably defeat itself.
A Democracy in Name Only
These maneuvers have a corrosive effect on the public. After decades of watching a rigged game, many Cameroonians—like myself— have concluded that their vote is worthless. This has cultivated a vast electorate of apathy. This way, low voter turnout is not a sign of the system’s failure, but of its success. A disengaged public is a demobilized one. When citizens believe the outcome is predetermined, they stay home, which only inflates the incumbent's margin of victory and reinforces the cycle of futility.
The final piece of this puzzle is the security nexus. Ongoing crises, like the brutal conflict in the country's Anglophone regions and the threat of Boko Haram in the north are more instruments of control than just tragic backdrops to the election.In fact, these regions are opposition strongholds. The violence and instability make voting dangerous, if not impossible, effectively disenfranchising millions of people who would likely vote against the regime. The permanent state of emergency in these areas serves to suppress the opposition vote under the guise of national security.
When you put all these pieces together—the legal repression, the constitutional engineering, the strategic fragmentation, and the weaponized insecurity—you are left with a Potemkin democracy. You have a system with all the appearances of a competitive election but none of the substance. The electoral commission is staffed with loyalists. The Constitutional Council, which validates the results, is a rubber stamp. The opposition is either divided, disqualified, or demotivated.
So when Paul Biya is likely declared the winner of his eighth term, it will not be because he is popular, but because the system he built has made any other outcome impossible. The real story of the 2025 Cameroonian election isn’t about who will win. It’s about how, in the 21st century, a ruler can maintain an iron grip on power not by tanks in the streets, but by mastering the quiet, bureaucratic violence of a rigged game. / YL
Jerry Lewis: You cannot polish a turd.
Stanley Kubrick: You can if you freeze it.— Related by Lewis in the NY Times article "What They Say About Stanley Kubrick" (1999)
Notes
I think I’ll expanding a bit more on the concepts I invoked in this piece, for a future glossary:
Legal repression
Constitutional engineering
Strategic fragmentation
Weaponized insecurity.