By Andrew Nsoseka
Issa Tchiroma Bakary’s decision to boycott Cameroon’s upcoming legislative and municipal elections has reignited a long-standing debate in the country’s opposition politics: does refusing to participate in flawed elections weaken an illegitimate system, or does it instead hand absolute power to the ruling CPDM and accelerate the decline of opposition parties?
In a strongly-worded public statement issued on January 15, 2026, and signed by his spokesperson, Barrister Alice Nkom, Tchiroma, who describes himself as the “Legitimate President” following the disputed October 12, 2025, presidential election, announced that neither he nor his party, the FSNC, would take part in any forthcoming electoral process.
“The FSNC will take part in neither the legislative elections nor the municipal elections,” the statement declared. “Any political party that participates in them endorses the wrongdoing and becomes complicit in it.”
According to Tchiroma, participation is impossible without the “prior, explicit, and unambiguous recognition of the sovereign will of the Cameroonian people,” which he insists was expressed in his favor during the 2025 presidential poll. He accused the ruling system of confiscating executive power through “massive fraud” and attempting to entrench itself further by organizing parliamentary and council elections “destined, as in the past, for all forms of fraud.
Framed as a moral and political refusal to legitimize what he calls an illegal regime, the boycott is presented by his camp as non-negotiable. The FSNC’s Central Committee, the statement warns, will not endorse or nominate any candidate who deviates from this line.
Yet beyond the defiant rhetoric lies a troubling historical parallel that Cameroon’s opposition can scarcely afford to ignore.
Over the past three decades, similar boycotts by opposition leaders — often justified on principled grounds – have ended up producing disastrous political outcomes. The late Ni John Fru Ndi’s Social Democratic Front (SDF), once the most formidable challenge to the CPDM, chose to boycott parliamentary elections after disputing presidential results in the 1990s and later years. That decision proved to be a turning point. By vacating parliament and local councils, the SDF allowed the ruling party to consolidate an overwhelming majority, marginalize dissenting voices, and gradually erode the SDF’s national relevance — a decline from which the party never truly recovered.
More recently, Maurice Kamto and the Cameroon Renaissance Movement (CRM) party repeated the same strategy after the contested 2018 presidential election. Kamto’s boycott of the 2020 municipal and legislative polls left the CPDM virtually unchallenged in parliament and local councils. While the move was applauded by some supporters as a courageous rejection of electoral fraud, it ultimately deprived the CRM of institutional footholds, visibility, and leverage. Five years on, the party has struggled to translate popular support into durable political power.
Kamto’s decision to boycott the local elections came back to haunt him when he could not run for the presidential election in 2025 because his party could not put forward a candidate since it had no representation in parliament or any municipality. His attempt to use another party flopped. All of that could have been avoided, if the party went in for the local elections.
It is against this backdrop that Tchiroma’s current posture raises uncomfortable questions. Is he charting a new path of resistance, or walking straight into the same political trap that ensnared Fru Ndi and Kamto?
Critics argue that while boycotts may offer short-term moral clarity, they often produce long-term strategic losses. Parliament and municipal councils, flawed as they may be, remain key arenas where power is exercised, resources are allocated, and political relevance is maintained. By absenting himself and his party, Tchiroma risks conceding these spaces entirely to the CPDM, further entrenching the “obsessed majority” he claims to oppose.
In his statement, Tchiroma framed the moment in stark terms: “Today, the choice is clear: for the people or against the people.”
But Cameroonian political history suggests that such binary framing can come at a high cost. The erosion of the SDF and the stagnation of the CRM ,stand as cautionary tales of opposition movements that mistook withdrawal for strategy.
