Inside Africa: The Island That Keeps Rewriting Itself: How the Comoros Balances an IMF Program Against a Democracy It Never Quite Built
In January 2025, Comorians went to the polls for parliamentary elections. President Azali Assoumani's party, the Convention pour le Renouveau des Comores, won 28 of 33 seats. Turnout was reported at 66 percent, but several opposition parties either boycotted the vote outright or rejected the results, citing transparency concerns and what they described as undemocratic conditions. The Supreme Court later annulled results in four constituencies due to procedural irregularities, changes to polling station personnel, ballot box issues, inconsistencies in official records, and ordered re-runs. For a country that has experienced more coups per capita than almost any other in the world, the scene was familiar.
A Constitution That Keeps Changing
The Union of the Comoros, three volcanic islands between Madagascar and the East African coast, with a population of around 800,000, has been rewriting its political architecture almost continuously since independence from France in 1975. The country endured more than 20 coups or coup attempts between independence and the early 2000s, until the Fomboni Agreement of 2001 produced a new constitution with a distinctive solution. The presidency would rotate every five years between the three islands, Grande Comore, Anjouan, and Moheli, distributing power and reducing the incentive for any one island to seize control of the central government by force.
The rotating system held for nearly two decades. Then, in July 2018, President Azali Assoumani, who had himself seized power in a coup in 1999 before transitioning to elected office, declared a referendum to amend the constitution. The official result gave 93 percent approval, but the vote was boycotted by the opposition, who called it an unconstitutional power grab. Freedom House documented that the referendum extended presidential term limits, abolished the Constitutional Court, the country's highest, and transferred its powers to a new chamber of the Supreme Court. It also removed the rotating presidency, centralizing the top position on Grande Comore, the largest island, where Azali's political base lies. Opponents on Anjouan, who alleged the change would lock their island out of government permanently, took to the streets; in October 2018, three people were killed in protests on the island.
Reelection, Alleged Fraud and a Succession Rumour
Azali has since collected two more electoral victories, in March 2019 and January 2024; both have been contested. In the 2024 presidential election, the commission initially credited him with 63 percent of the vote in a field of six candidates, with turnout reported at just 16 percent, even as simultaneous elections for island governorships drew turnout above 50 percent. The Supreme Court later revised the figures to show 57 percent support and 56 percent turnout. His five opponents rejected the results, alleging massive fraud and the politicization of the court.
Then, in January 2025, a speech Azali delivered on Moheli added a new dimension to the country's political uncertainty. Speaking to supporters, he said he would "take a child to put in my place" when he leaves office, remarks his critics immediately interpreted as signalling his intention to hand power to his son, Nour El Fath, whom he had appointed as government secretary general after his 2024 reelection. The president's office denied that the word he used in Comorian referred specifically to his son, saying it was customary to address all citizens as children. The ambiguity was real, the term he used can mean “child,” “son,” or “daughter”, but the political temperature it raised was not.
The Press That Keeps Being Silenced
Moustoifa’s arrest was not an isolated incident. Reporters Without Borders has documented a pattern of journalist intimidation in the Comoros stretching back years. In 2019, following Azali's reelection amid protests, Comorian journalists staged an unprecedented press boycott of government activities for two weeks, citing “many attacks on journalists and media outlets.” In 2020, two reporters were arrested for "disturbing public order" while travelling to cover an opposition rally. In 2023, RSF condemned the judicial proceedings against four journalists charged with "defamation and insult" after reporting on alleged sexual violence against women working at the state broadcaster.
In one notable development that civil society claimed as a partial win, parliament voted in December 2025 to revise the Information Code to confirm that journalists are not required to disclose their sources, adopted by 31 of 33 MPs after pressure from press freedom groups. Yet even in the same period, Moustoifa was summoned and interrogated for a Facebook post about the treatment of migrants who had washed up on the island.
An IMF Programme Running Alongside All of This
While political pressure on civil society intensifies, the Comoros has been running a four-year Extended Credit Facility program with the International Monetary Fund, a rare institutional lifeline for one of the Indian Ocean's smallest and most economically fragile nations. By June 2025, the IMF Executive Board had completed the fourth review of the program, releasing SDR 3.56 million (approximately $4.87 million) in financing, bringing total disbursements to about $23.5 million.
The program's focus includes strengthening domestic revenue collection, improving public financial management, overhauling oversight of state-owned enterprises, and reforming the banking sector, including restructuring the postal bank into a new Postal Bank of Comoros. But the IMF's own language in the fourth review assessment is candid about the limits of progress: only two of five quantitative end-December 2024 targets were met; the government missed its tax revenue target and accumulated new external debt arrears; and three of ten structural benchmarks between November 2024 and April 2025 were not completed.
The World Bank's 2025 Comoros Economic Update is equally clear-eyed. Growth rose from 3 percent in 2023 to 3.4 percent in 2024, supported by rising remittances, which averaged 11.3 percent of GDP over the past decade, and a recovering services sector. But the poverty rate stood at 38.1 percent in 2024, the fiscal deficit widened from 1.3 to 3.9 percent of GDP, public debt rose to 36.8 percent, and the IMF and World Bank together classified Comoros as at high risk of debt distress.
Remittances and the Diaspora Question
One thread running through all of this is the central, and often underappreciated, role of the Comorian diaspora, concentrated primarily in France, particularly on Mayotte, the French-administered island that Comoros officially claims as its own territory and that Azali described at the UN General Assembly in 2025 as “one of the last open wounds of decolonization in Africa.” Remittances averaging more than 11 percent of GDP have been the single largest driver of household consumption growth and the main buffer against deeper poverty, more significant than either exports or government social spending.
In June 2025, the UN Economic Commission for Africa organized a national workshop in Moroni specifically to explore how diaspora remittances could be more formally channelled into productive investment and development planning, rather than serving primarily as household survival income. Whether that kind of institution-building can take hold in a country where public financial management is flagged by the IMF as persistently weak is the central question that underlies all others.
Between Reform and Consolidation
The Comoros presents an analytical puzzle that many small, aid-dependent states share, but in a particularly concentrated form: a government pursuing internationally supported economic reforms through formal institutions, while simultaneously consolidating political power, restricting press freedom, and managing elections whose legitimacy is contested by a substantial portion of its own population.
Civil society actors are not absent. Youth movements like Ngo'Shawo, led by president Moudjib Mohamed Said, have publicly challenged the opposition's long-standing boycott strategy, arguing that empty-chair politics have produced no results and that engagement, even within a flawed system, is a more productive form of pressure. An opposition leader, Achmet Saïd Mohame of the Hury party, was released on provisional bail in May 2025 after more than a year in detention, a hunger strike, and what his supporters described as harsh prison conditions.
These are not dramatic moments by the standards of larger conflicts. But in a country of 800,000 people on three islands, they are the texture of daily political life, the space in which Comorians are negotiating what kind of state they will have, alongside an IMF program that measures success in tax-collection benchmarks and a diaspora that sends more money home than the government raises in domestic revenue. Whether those two tracks, the external programme of institutional reform and the internal contest over democratic legitimacy, can converge before the question of who succeeds Azali Assoumani becomes the country's next defining crisis is the Comoros' most consequential open question.
