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Burkina Faso’s military ruler told his country on Thursday to stop waiting for elections and abandon democracy as a political framework, in a statement that formalised what his government’s actions since the 2022 coup have already made evident on the ground.
Captain Ibrahim Traore, speaking in an interview broadcast on national television, was unambiguous in a way that authoritarian leaders rarely are in public. “We’re not even talking about elections, first of all,” he said. “People need to forget about the issue of democracy. Democracy isn’t for us.”
The declaration did not represent a change in policy so much as a public acknowledgement of one. Traore has governed Burkina Faso since seizing power in September 2022, himself ousting a junta that had come to power eight months earlier in the country’s first coup of that year. Since consolidating control, he has moved methodically to dismantle the institutional architecture that democracy requires. The electoral commission was dissolved last year. In February, the junta-led parliament — itself an unelected body — formally banned all political parties, whose activities had already been suspended since 2022. A transition to civilian rule that was supposed to conclude in July 2024 was extended by five years, keeping Traore in power through at least 2029.
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What Thursday’s interview added to this record was candour rather than novelty. Traore did not claim to be pursuing a modified or delayed form of democracy, as juntas typically do when international pressure requires them to maintain the fiction of a return to civilian rule. He said outright that the concept does not apply to his country. It is the kind of statement that eliminates ambiguity in ways that are useful to him domestically — signalling to potential challengers that no electoral path to power exists — while confirming what outside observers had already concluded.
The United Nations has called on Burkina Faso to reverse the ban on political parties and halt what it has described as the repression of civic space. The junta has not indicated any intention to comply. Traore’s government is openly hostile to Western nations and to France in particular, reflecting a broader regional drift among Sahel juntas — Mali and Niger have taken similar postures — away from the French security and political frameworks that governed the region for decades and toward relationships with Russia that offer military partnership without democratic conditionality.
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International media have been among the casualties of the junta’s consolidation. Numerous outlets have been banned or suspended since Traore took power, and foreign journalists have been expelled. The effect is to limit the independent documentation of conditions inside a country that has been living with jihadist violence for nearly a decade — violence that has claimed thousands of lives, displaced millions and served as the original justification for the first coup in January 2022. The security situation, which the coup leaders promised to resolve more effectively than the civilian government they removed, has not improved under military rule by any measurable account.
Traore’s argument, implicit in his dismissal of democracy as unsuitable for Burkina Faso, is presumably that survival and security take precedence over political freedom — a claim that governments facing genuine security crises sometimes make in good faith and authoritarian governments routinely make to justify the consolidation of power that serves their own interests. Distinguishing between the two requires the kind of independent journalism and political opposition that his government has been systematically eliminating.
The statement will draw condemnation from international bodies and Western governments. It will change nothing about how Burkina Faso is being governed.
