2024 Mozambican general election
Based on Wikipedia: 2024 Mozambican general election
The Election That Sparked a Revolt
On October 9th, 2024, Mozambicans went to the polls. By December, at least four hundred people were dead—most of them protesters shot by police and soldiers in the streets.
What happened in Mozambique wasn't just a disputed election. It was the latest chapter in a fifty-year story of a liberation movement that became a ruling party, then became something closer to an authoritarian regime that refuses to let go of power. To understand why protesters filled the streets and why security forces responded with lethal force, you need to understand how Mozambique got here.
A Country Born in Revolution
Mozambique sits on the southeastern coast of Africa, stretching along the Indian Ocean for about 2,500 kilometers. It's a country roughly twice the size of California, home to over 30 million people who speak dozens of different languages but share a colonial history under Portuguese rule that lasted nearly five centuries.
The Front for the Liberation of Mozambique—known by its Portuguese acronym FRELIMO—led the armed struggle for independence. When the Portuguese finally withdrew in 1975, FRELIMO didn't just become the governing party. It became the state itself, establishing a one-party system modeled on Marxist-Leninist principles. There was no loyal opposition because there was no opposition at all. FRELIMO was Mozambique, and Mozambique was FRELIMO.
That arrangement lasted until the early 1990s. A brutal civil war had raged for sixteen years between FRELIMO and RENAMO, the Mozambican National Resistance, which had been backed at various points by the white-minority governments of Rhodesia and South Africa. The war killed perhaps a million people and displaced millions more. When peace finally came in 1992, it came with conditions: Mozambique would hold multiparty elections.
Those elections began in 1994. FRELIMO has won every single one since.
The Art of Winning Every Time
Here's the fundamental tension at the heart of Mozambican democracy: the country holds regular elections with multiple parties and candidates, yet one party has held power continuously for fifty years. Either FRELIMO is genuinely popular enough to win every election fairly, or the elections aren't actually fair. Or perhaps some combination of both.
The opposition has consistently chosen the second explanation. They point to patterns that repeat themselves election after election: ballot boxes that arrive pre-filled, voting stations where their observers are denied access, official results that don't match what their poll watchers recorded, voter rolls padded with names of people who don't exist.
That last point—the phantom voters—became a particular flashpoint in 2024. A Mozambican civil society organization called the Center for Public Integrity, or Centro de Integridade Pública, dug into the official voter registration data. What they found was striking: in some provinces, there were more registered voters than there were adults of voting age living there. Nearly 900,000 more, to be precise. They called these excess registrations "ghost voters."
The International Institute for Democracy and Electoral Assistance, an intergovernmental organization based in Sweden, confirmed the pattern. In seven of Mozambique's ten provinces, registered voters exceeded the actual voting-age population. In Gaza Province, up to a third of the registered electorate appeared to be non-existent.
Gaza Province, it's worth noting, is FRELIMO's heartland—the birthplace of the independence movement and its most reliable base of support.
The Candidates
FRELIMO's choice for president in 2024 marked a generational shift. Daniel Chapo was 47 years old, a law professor who had served as governor of Inhambane Province. More significantly, he was born after independence. Every previous FRELIMO presidential candidate had been shaped by the liberation struggle. Chapo represented something new: a leader whose formative experiences came entirely in the post-independence era.
Whether this represented genuine renewal or merely a fresh face on an unchanged system was a matter of perspective.
The main opposition came from an unexpected direction. RENAMO, which had been the primary opposition party for three decades, fielded its leader Ossufo Momade. But Momade had lost badly in 2019, and RENAMO's reputation as a meaningful alternative had faded. The party that had once commanded armies now seemed content to play the role of permanent runner-up.
The real challenge came from Venâncio Mondlane.
Mondlane was a banker and forestry engineer who had broken away from RENAMO after a bitter dispute. In 2023, he had run for mayor of Maputo, the capital. He claimed victory based on his supporters' count of the vote. The official results gave the win to FRELIMO's candidate. Mondlane refused to accept the outcome and became a hero to Mozambicans frustrated with what they saw as FRELIMO's grip on power.
For the 2024 presidential race, Mondlane registered as an independent candidate but received backing from PODEMOS—the Optimist Party for the Development of Mozambique. The name itself suggested a break from the old liberation-era politics. This wasn't a party forged in civil war or ideological struggle. It was something newer, more focused on economic development and governance reform.
There was also a fourth candidate, Lutero Simango of the Democratic Movement of Mozambique, though he never emerged as a serious contender.
Campaign Season
From August through early October, candidates crisscrossed the country making their cases. Both Chapo and Mondlane even crossed into neighboring South Africa, where hundreds of thousands of Mozambicans live and work, appealing to expatriate voters.
All three major candidates said their top priority would be resolving the insurgency in Cabo Delgado, the northernmost province. Since 2017, an armed group with links to the Islamic State had been attacking villages, towns, and a massive natural gas project. The violence had killed thousands and displaced nearly a million people. For a country that thought it had put civil conflict behind it, Cabo Delgado was a terrifying reminder that peace remained fragile.
Most observers expected Chapo to win. The question was whether the election would be credible enough for the losers to accept the result.
October 9th
Polls opened at 7 in the morning and closed at 6 in the evening. International observers from the Southern African Development Community, the African Union, and the European Union spread out across the country to monitor the process.
What they saw troubled them.
More than 200 polling stations refused to let journalists and election observers watch the vote counting. An election monitoring group called Sala da Paz—"Peace Room" in Portuguese—documented what it called "significant cases of electoral irregularities that may raise questions about the credibility of the process."
Opposition representatives reported ballot boxes being opened before voting had finished. Some of their accredited monitors were turned away from polling stations entirely. The usual patterns were emerging.
Before the official count was even complete, Mondlane declared himself the winner.
Two Counts, Two Realities
By October 16th, preliminary results showed Chapo in the lead. On October 24th, the National Election Commission—known by its Portuguese initials CNE—made it official. Daniel Chapo had won with 71 percent of the vote. FRELIMO had swept all ten provincial elections. In the national assembly, FRELIMO would hold 195 of 250 seats.
Turnout, notably, was just 43 percent. More than half of registered voters—including those nearly 900,000 ghost voters—had apparently stayed home.
PODEMOS rejected the results entirely. The party produced its own count based on data from the monitors it had stationed at polling places across the country. According to their tally, Mondlane had won with 53 percent of the vote, and PODEMOS had won 138 parliamentary seats.
To support their claim, PODEMOS delivered something unusual: more than 660 pounds of paper. These were tabulated ballot results from individual polling stations, the raw data their observers had recorded before being kicked out of counting rooms or before the official results diverged from what they had witnessed.
On December 23rd, the Constitutional Council—Mozambique's highest court for electoral matters—validated the official results. But critically, the validated numbers differed from what the CNE had originally announced. The court didn't explain the discrepancies.
The Streets Explode
Mozambicans didn't wait for the Constitutional Council to rule. Protests erupted as soon as the CNE announced results.
In Maputo and other cities, demonstrators blocked roads, burned tires, and clashed with police. Security forces responded with live ammunition. The death toll climbed: dozens in the first weeks, then over a hundred, eventually reaching at least 400 by some counts. Most of the dead were protesters, killed by police and soldiers.
The Episcopal Conference of Mozambique—the organization of Catholic bishops in this predominantly Christian country—publicly questioned the election results. This was significant. The Catholic Church has deep roots in Mozambique and considerable moral authority. For the bishops to express doubt was a marker of how seriously credibility had eroded.
The European Union, which had sent election observers, issued statements questioning the integrity of the process. This mattered too, because European aid and investment are vital to Mozambique's economy.
International reactions otherwise followed predictable patterns. China's foreign ministry congratulated FRELIMO and Chapo on their "election victory" and called for continued strong ties. China has significant investments in Mozambique, particularly in natural resources and infrastructure. South Africa's President Cyril Ramaphosa also congratulated the winners while calling for calm and denouncing violence—a careful both-sides statement from a neighboring country that shares a long border and hosts many Mozambican migrants.
What It Means
Mozambique's 2024 election raises uncomfortable questions about what democracy means in practice.
The country has all the formal structures: multiple parties, regular elections, international observers, constitutional courts. These are the institutions that are supposed to guarantee that power flows from the consent of the governed. But when the same party wins every time, when voter rolls contain hundreds of thousands of phantom names, when observers are barred from watching ballots being counted, when protesters are shot in the streets—can you really call it democracy?
FRELIMO would argue that it genuinely commands majority support. The party did lead the country to independence. It did end the civil war. For all its flaws, Mozambique has seen real economic growth, real improvements in health and education. Many Mozambicans, particularly in the south, feel genuine loyalty to the party.
But even if FRELIMO could win a fair election, it clearly isn't willing to take that risk. The ghost voters, the blocked observers, the divergent counts—these aren't the actions of a party confident in its popular mandate. They're the actions of a party that has learned to win by controlling the process rather than winning hearts and minds.
Venâncio Mondlane represents something new and potentially destabilizing: a charismatic opposition figure who refuses to accept rigged results, who has the documentation to back up his claims, and who commands enough popular support to fill the streets. Whether this leads to genuine democratic reform or to prolonged instability—or both—remains to be seen.
What's certain is that Mozambique's long experiment with one-party rule under democratic trappings is showing serious cracks. The four hundred people who died in the protests paid the highest price for that contradiction.
The Connection to Cabo Delgado
It's worth pausing on why Cardinal Pietro Parolin, the Vatican's Secretary of State—essentially the Pope's prime minister—chose to visit Mozambique in the aftermath of this contested election.
Northern Mozambique, particularly Cabo Delgado province, has become one of the world's most dangerous places for Christians. The insurgency there, while Islamic in character, has targeted anyone—Muslim or Christian—who doesn't submit to its brutal rule. Churches have been burned. Priests have been killed. Entire Christian communities have fled their homes.
The Vatican's engagement reflects a broader pattern: as Mozambique's political crisis deepens, the human cost falls disproportionately on the most vulnerable. The insurgency in the north shows no signs of ending. The political instability in the south makes it harder for the government to focus resources on security. And ordinary Mozambicans—whether facing bullets from insurgents in Cabo Delgado or from police in Maputo—are caught in the middle.
FRELIMO's continued rule depends on its ability to deliver stability and development. If it can't resolve the northern insurgency and can only maintain power through force in the south, its legitimacy will continue to erode. The question is whether that erosion leads to reform, to deeper repression, or to something worse.