Middle East & Africa | A barely governable country

For Congo’s next president, winning may be the easy part

Whoever it is, a staggeringly hard task beckons

An electoral commision official sits inside a voting station before the opening of the polls at the Institut Zanner in Goma.
Photograph: Getty Images
|KINSHASA

On December 20th, as The Economist went to press, millions of Congolese were queuing to vote. The much-criticised electoral commission will probably claim that the very fact of holding a general election on time in a country four times the size of France should itself be considered a triumph. Yet as Moïse Katumbi, a leading opposition candidate, angrily puts it: “Which type of election?”

This article appeared in the Middle East & Africa section of the print edition under the headline “The hard part comes next”

From the December 23rd 2023 edition

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