Presidential elections were held on November 13 in Somaliland, a republic that became autonomously independent in 1991 but is not recognized by any state in the world. These are the fourth presidential elections in the country’s history, held every five years, and were originally scheduled for 2022, although then delayed as a result of disputes-still unresolved-between government forces and opposition parties.
Challenging each other in the polls were the outgoing president, Muse Bihi Abdi, who heads the Peace Unity and Development Party (Kulmiye) and is seeking a second term, and the two opposition candidates Abdirahman Mohamed Abdullahi, of the Somaliland National Party (Waddani), and Faysal Ali Warabe, of the Justice and Welfare Party (UCID).
Muse Bihi Abd, who belongs to the Isaaq clan and the Gadabuursi subclan, is a former Somali Air Force officer, trained in the USSR and then in the U.S., who defected in 1985 by joining the Somali National Movement rebels, participating in the struggle for Somaliland’s independence and then in the uprising that led to the fall of Siad Barre in 1991. He joined local politics soon after, being appointed first as minister of the interior in 1994 and then as vice president of the republic in 2008. Two years later he was elected to the presidency of the Kulmiye party, then running in 2017 in the presidential elections, where he succeeded on November 21 of that year.
Abdi has set much of his election campaign on trying to obtain the first formal recognition of Somaliland’s independence by a foreign country, taking advantage of the memorandum of understanding signed on January 1, 2024, with the Ethiopian government. Under this document, the full details of which are not known, Somaliland is said to have proposed to Ethiopia the possibility of developing its own naval base on the Indian Ocean with a 50-year concession, in return for a commitment from Addis Ababa to explore the possibilities of a formal recognition of the country’s independence. Move that provoked the wrath of the Somali government and criticism from several other international countries, leading to a complex crisis with uncertain outcomes.
Abdirahman Mohamed Abdullahi, of the Habr Yunis clan and the Abukar Logeh subclan, was a government official and then a diplomat in the Somali Republic until 1991, when he moved to Finland when Siad Barre’s regime fell. Returning to Somaliland a few years later, he founded the Justice and Development Party in 2002, with the intention of contributing to the independence cause and supporting the country’s development programs, being elected as an MP in 2005. Appearing in the 2017 presidential election, he was defeated by Abdi.
Abdullahi’s 2024 election campaign was mainly geared toward promoting an agenda of democratic reforms for the country and social cohesion, investing heavily in the need to resolve the country’s many clan and territorial tensions.
Finally, Faysal Ali Warabe, who belongs to the Isaaq clan and Eidagale subclan, is an engineer by training who worked for a long time in Somalia’s Ministry of Public Works, also taking refuge in Finland at the time of the 1991 civil war. He returned to Somaliland and founded the Justice and Welfare Party, of which he is chairperson. Warabe’s story is also sadly notorious for the events surrounding his son, Sayid Hussein Feisal Warabe, who died in 2017 at just 26 years old after becoming radicalized and joining ISIS jihadist group in Syria, where he was allegedly killed in an airstrike.
Warabe’s campaign, who is running for the fourth time in the presidential election, has been geared toward strengthening Somaliland’s national unity and social justice, in fact posing as a splicing program between Abdi’s and Abdullahi’s candidacies.
The National Election Commission (NEC) confirmed how the elections were held in a peaceful and orderly manner as more than one million citizens went to the polls.
Counting of ballots began the next day and results are expected by November 21. The local press makes no secret of how outgoing President Abdi is seeking consensus for a second term, although he has being strongly opposed by both Abdullahi and Warabe. The former accuses Abdi of mishandling the crisis that led to a full-blown conflict in the town of Las Anod last year, which ended in defeat and the loss of large swaths of territory to Puntland. The latter accuses him instead of undermining the country’s social stability and altering its principles of justice.
Vice President Abdirahman Saylici, however, has also been sharply critical of Abdi, openly announcing his support for Abdullahi’s candidacy, generating what appears in all likelihood to be the most serious threat to the outgoing president’s re-election.
