When Angola’s most recent electoral process was unfolding in August 2022, I felt compelled to revisit Margeret Anstee’s book, Orphan of the Cold War: The Inside Story of the Collapse of the Angolan Peace Process, 1992-3, for clues to make sense of it all. In the early 1990s, Anstee was the UN Secretary-General’s Special Representative to Angola. Her main job was to oversee the peace process agreed to by the governing MPLA (People’s Movement for the Liberation of Angola) and UNITA (National Union for the Total Liberation of Angola) the previous year. General elections were supposed to formalize power in a country whose political life ever since independence in 1975 was mainly characterized by civil war between the MPLA (an urban Marxist-Leninist government) and UNITA (and a pro-capitalist, vaguely Maoist, and Apartheid South Africa-supported rebel movement). Instead, following the elections of 1992, the civil war resumed.

The elections of 1992 are crucial to understanding Angola’s painful road to democracy, as Anstee has so forcefully insisted—a point most news coverage normally misses about Angola. I agree with Anstee that the elections of 1992 (the first and only time Angolans voted directly for their president) were for the most part free and fair. I would also add that they have been the only free and fair elections the country has organized to date because it was the one time the MPLA-government allowed power to be up for grabs in a general election. In subsequent elections (2008, 2012, 2017, 2022), the party machine fought forcefully and ruthlessly to organize elections that they could not lose. The elections since 1992 have certainly opened the possibility for the construction of democracy in Angola. But a countervailing process undertaken by the ruling party has integrated anti-democratic elements into the democratic order. The MPLA’s objective is to stay in power indefinitely.

With the 2022 elections, I think the MPLA-government reached the end of a cycle. From now on, as Giuseppe Lampedusa famously suggested in his novel The Leopard (albeit in a different context), things for (the MPLA) will have to drastically change for everything to be the same.

In 1992, for the first time, Angolans were called to vote for the president of the republic and parliamentary members in separate ballots. This was the root of the subsequent electoral crisis. Whereas MPLA gained the majority in parliament, the MPLA’s presidential candidate incumbent José Eduardo dos Santos failed to beat Jonas Savimbi in the first round. A second round was scheduled to take place a few weeks later but it never happened. By then Savimbi had already left Luanda, reassembled his troops, which had never been fully demobilized, and started to overtake cities and small towns. The post-electoral crisis did not only cause the death of thousands of Angolans but also plunged the country into ten more years of civil war.

After the killing of Savimbi in 2002, the possibility opened up for a return to the democratic process, and pressure from the international community increased. But the priorities of the Angolan government and the international community did not coincide. Whereas donors and international observers wanted the country to organize elections to legitimize power, the government defended the position that elections could only take place after the reconstruction of the infrastructure destroyed by the war. These squabbles coincided with the boom in global oil prices and the government prevailed by going ahead with its plans for reconstruction, backed by China’s massive loans as the guarantor.

In the ruling party’s plans, the purpose of national reconstruction was not only to improve infrastructure, allowing for the circulation of people and goods, but also to shape society in a certain way, or more precisely to shape the relationship between state and society. Having headed the state since 1979, Dos Santos felt that the war had robbed him of the opportunity to be a president, in the true sense of the word, and to be seen not simply as a commander-in-chief, and a warlord, but as a reformer, or transformer. Reigning over a civil society hit by apathy, he managed to impose his own vision of how things should go forward. The kind of American or Brazilian model of democracy, in which candidates need to court citizens’ votes did not interest him. He governed in the style of the colonists. A son of the colonial regime, he was pretty much a follower of António de Oliveira Salazar, who wrote and refined the Estado Novo’s constitution, which ever since the elections of 1948, created the legal mechanisms to organize elections that his party and his candidates could not lose.

In December 2007, dos Santos announced elections for September the following year. But with an important caveat: Elections would be only for parliament, and the country would wait until the next year to hold the presidential elections. One sees here the mark of 1992. In 2009 instead of announcing the dates and the process for presidential elections, dos Santos conveyed his party’s willingness to change the country’s constitution. In the previous year, the MPLA had won with more than 81.61% of the total ballots, which gave the party the right to amend the constitution.

In 2012, the ruling party won the elections for the first time under the terms of the new constitution adopted in 2010. South Africa was the inspiration for the new format for elections: the president of the party with the largest number of votes becomes the president of the republic by virtue of being the first name on the list of the political organization, party or coalition presented for the legislative elections, but. without the checks and balances of South Africa, needless to say (for instance, the separation between the executive and the judicial). Crucially, the president is not directly elected, but he/she has the prerogative to appoint most of the public officials (provincial governors, justice, the military, the police leadership and so on). In 2017, the MPLA won elections again, this time with 61% of the votes. We should pay attention here to the number, not only the fact of winning the majority but also the percentage the MPLA was losing in the elections. That’s a nearly 20% drop since 2009.

In 2017, dos Santos, for reasons related to his health, was no longer the candidate the MPLA put forward for the elections. He had chosen João Lourenço to run as president even as he remained the leader of the MPLA. This was an unusual situation. Since 1975, leading the party and leading the country had been the job of only one individual. Explicitly or at least implicitly, dos Santos had entered into this deal in exchange for his own protection, not to be subjected to any legal embarrassment, and the protection of the accumulated wealth of his family, particularly his children (one of his daughters, Isabel dos Santos, had been considered the richest woman in Africa by Forbes).