Weeks of protests in July 2025 in Angola left 30 dead and hundreds imprisoned. Sparked by a hike in fuel prices, the outcome of a governmental effort to reduce subsidies, the unrest quickly spread across the country.
This escalation, along with the government’s uncompromising reaction, is symptomatic of two things: the country’s dire economic conditions, and mounting discontent over disappointed expectations of change in President João Lourenço’s Angola.
After 38 years of rule by José Eduardo dos Santos, Lourenço’s 2017 inauguration briefly had “many Angolans dreaming again”. Those dreams, however, have since been shattered.
One repeatedly broken promise recently slipped by almost unnoticed when, two weeks after the protests, Angola’s parliament quietly wrapped up the legislative year. While Angola’s MPs have begun to pave the way for the 2027 national elections through adjustments to electoral statutes, there was nothing on the agenda about the country’s long-promised local elections.
Over the past 15 years, Angolans have grown accustomed to delays and postponements of what was once hailed as a building block for a more democratic country. Back in 2010, the ruling MPLA had prominently recommitted to the election of local governments – the autarquias – in the country’s constitution.
This promise of decentralisation initially captured the imagination of civil society and international organisations. But it has given way to disillusionment after delays and lukewarm excuses. Justifications alternate between insufficient infrastructure, unresolved legislative issues, or the COVID-19 pandemic.
I am an interdisciplinary social scientist, and for my PhD I studied Angola’s cities and the country’s highly centralised system of local governance.
My research leads me to conclude that Angola’s government has no real interest in establishing the autarquias – at least not anymore. What’s got in the way of the ruling power’s decentralisation strategy has been an astoundingly rapid transformation of Angola’s traditional political geography.
This transformation of demography and party affiliation has increasingly deprived the ruling party, the MPLA, of the urban electorate that it once believed to be its core support group. This helps explain why hopes for systematic change in post-war Angola have mostly faltered.
The reversal of Angola’s political geography
In 2002, Angola emerged from decades of civil war as an autocratic one-party state. In the following years, the MPLA government under Dos Santos cautiously introduced reforms. These included the first peacetime multi-party elections in 2008 and the easing of repression. And with the 2010 constitution, the government recommitted to decentralisation.
After a sweeping 2008 victory, the MPLA stood at the height of its power. It had secured more than 80% of the national vote (the vast majority in all provinces) and Unita, its former war adversary, was weak and discredited. Flush with abundant oil revenues and Chinese credit lines, Angola’s government could feel fairly confident in its grip on power.
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It also opted for the idea of “gradualism”. This meant restricting local elections to the party’s traditional city strongholds where it felt most secure in its electoral support.
However, the rise of Unita as the opposition party soon upended the government’s power calculus. Rooted in the Ovimbundu communities of the Angolan highlands, Unita had, during the years of war, often been described and framed as the rural counterpart to the supposedly more modern and urban MPLA. But soon after the war’s end in 2002, the party turned into a serious contender and managed to expand its support base.
It has also emerged as a viable alternative for a young and politically alienated urban electorate in Angola’s cities. For them, Unita offers a potential break with a political system in which they have lost faith.
The electoral results are unambiguous evidence of that. In each national election since 2008, the MPLA lost around 10% of the vote. This dynamic was most pronounced in the capital, Luanda, which Unita officially won for the first time in 2022.
This power shift in Luanda strikes at the very foundation of the MPLA system.
The imperative to control Luanda
Angola is dominated by its capital city – a system that I have elsewhere analysed as “metropolitan bias”. Around 40% of Angolan city dwellers live in the capital. It also generates and absorbs the vast majority of economic and financial resources in the country.
These riches underpin what other researchers have described as a type of urban “political settlement”. This means that the patronage structures and corruption characteristic of post-war Angola fundamentally depend on the financial capital attracted to the oil-fuelled real estate and construction sectors of Luanda.
An oppositional capital would be all but unacceptable to the ruling MPLA.
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Over the years the kleptocratic dynamics of Angola’s elite-controlled system have been laid bare by research on Angola’s political economy and the type of investigative journalism that produced the infamous Luanda Leaks. These have shown how the intertwining of the party-state with the petro-economy has facilitated the blatant self-enrichment of Angola’s ruling class.
In contrast, almost every second Angolan lives on less than US$3.65 a day. For their part, those close to the inner circle of power have largely distributed the country’s oil wealth among themselves.
From promises to manipulation
Judged against its own promises of decentralisation and faced with the emergence of a decidedly urban Unita electorate, the MPLA has a dilemma. For the last 15 years its solution has been to opt for a permanent delay.
Oppositional and civil society groups like the “Jovens pelas autarquias” (Youth for Local Government) have long denounced what’s occurred.
The latest chapter in the Angolan decentralisation saga came in 2025 with a new administrative structure. The number of local government units has been more than doubled and the capital splintered into 16 units.
This reform will allow the MPLA to blame delays on insufficient infrastructure for the foreseeable future. It will also ensure that, should autarquias be established at some point, local governments will remain relatively weak.
This is a well-worn anti-democratic strategy of manipulating decentralisation – tried and tested in countries such as Ethiopia, Malawi and Uganda.
There can be little doubt that the early enthusiasm that greeted Lourenço’s inauguration in 2017 has faded and that the current outlook for local democracy in Angola does not appear much brighter than under his predecessor.
One may therefore reasonably doubt that Angolans will see local elections taking place any time soon.
The most important question ahead is how the MPLA will respond to the type of escalating grievances that have recently erupted in the streets of Luanda. And to what extent it will allow these popular sentiments to find free and fair expression in the 2027 national elections.
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