Togo: Faure Gnassingbé and the riddle of a power that reinvents itself

More than twenty years after taking the helm of Togo, Faure Gnassingbé confronts an increasingly arduous equation: how does one retain power when popular confidence alone no longer suffices to confer legitimacy?

Since assuming office in 2005, the Togolese head of state has weathered successive political crises, bitterly contested elections and repeated mobilisations by the opposition. Over time, criticism has not been confined to electoral outcomes; it has extended to the very conditions under which political competition is organised. For his detractors, the central issue is no longer simply who wins an election, but whether the prevailing conditions genuinely permit a change of power.

Institutions reshaped around the incumbent

It is against this backdrop that successive institutional manoeuvres must be assessed. When a political system is repeatedly rearranged around the figure who leads it, every constitutional or institutional amendment ends up prompting the same question: is this a reform intended to strengthen institutions, or an additional means of preserving the incumbent’s position?

The matter has grown more delicate with recent institutional transformations. The shift to a new political system, the redistribution of powers and the creation of fresh functions at the summit of the state have fed the criticism of those who discern not a break with the past but a novel way of organising the regime’s continuity.

The most contested point lies precisely there: the retention of power does not always come through an election won at the ballot box. It may equally come through mastery of the institutions that govern the exercise of power.

The calendar, the architecture and the questions they raise

This explains the misgivings prompted by the failure to hold presidential elections according to the anticipated timetable and by the new institutional architecture that followed. In the eyes of his opponents, a change of mechanism does not necessarily signify a change of power. It could, on the contrary, enable Faure Gnassingbé to remain at the heart of the political apparatus while altering the office through which he exerts his influence.

The appointment of Jean-Lucien Savi de Tové to the presidency of the Republic likewise fuelled further controversy. Officially, it represents a new institutional configuration. For the regime’s adversaries, however, the real question lies elsewhere: who actually holds power, and who determines the country’s principal political orientations?

That very question underpins the accusation that the officially installed president does not possess sufficient political autonomy in relation to Faure Gnassingbé. His critics maintain that the true centre of decision-making remains in the hands of the former president, now president of the Council, and that the new institutional architecture has thus preserved his influence without recourse to a fresh presidential election.

While the authorities dispute this reading, it nonetheless lays bare a persistent democratic unease: when an institutional reform allows a leader who has already spent more than two decades at the summit of the state to remain the dominant political actor, the question of the reform’s true purpose becomes unavoidable.

A question that transcends one man

The problem therefore extends beyond the person of Faure Gnassingbé. It touches the very functioning of the Togolese state. A robust democracy should not be designed around one individual’s capacity to remain indispensable, but around institutions able to operate independently of the interests of those in power.

To this must be added recurring allegations of a restricted political space, tensions with the opposition, electoral disputes and criticism concerning governance. Taken in isolation, each episode may be interpreted differently. Yet set within the perspective of twenty-one years in power, they trace, for the regime’s opponents, a single trajectory: that of a system concerned less with preparing for alternation than with organising its own continuity.

Herein lies the true paradox of Faure Gnassingbé’s tenure. After so many years at the country’s helm, the question should no longer be how to remain in power through ever-new institutional configurations, but how to durably convince Togolese citizens that their choices can genuinely alter the direction of their country.

For a democracy is measured neither solely by the number of institutions it possesses nor by the texts it adopts. It is measured above all by the real possibility of alternation, by the independence of institutions and by citizens’ capacity to punish or renew their leaders through the ballot.

When institutional mechanisms become sufficiently elaborate for power to change form without necessarily changing hands, suspicion takes root.

And that is precisely the question the Togolese authorities cannot indefinitely evade: if Faure Gnassingbé is truly convinced that he enjoys the confidence of the Togolese people, why do so many transformations appear necessary to guarantee the continuity of his political influence?

At bottom, the debate in Togo is no longer merely that of a man seeking to hold on to power. It is that of a political system confronted with a simple demand: to allow citizens, at last, to determine freely, clearly and unambiguously who should govern the country.