Beyond the Ballot: Who Really Won Somalia’s Election?

The final results of Mogadishu’s recent election may take a week—or longer—to be formally declared. Yet the most consequential outcomes were already clear the moment polling stations closed. Long before winners and losers are named on paper, the election itself produced verdicts on questions that have haunted Somali politics for decades: capacity, security, legitimacy, and ownership.

First, the numbers alone tell a powerful story. Nearly half a million citizens cast their ballots in just 12 hours, across more than 500 polling stations in the capital. This was not a symbolic exercise; it was a mass civic mobilization on a scale few believed possible in Mogadishu. Behind it stood roughly 5,000 election workers and an electoral commission implementing such an operation for the first time—from planning and coordination to execution. They delivered.

In doing so, they decisively answered critics who had long questioned the competence, professionalism, efficiency, and integrity of Somali electoral institutions. The long-running argument that Somali bodies lack the quality or expertise to run credible elections did not merely weaken—it lost.

Security, the perennial excuse, was the next test. Facilitating the movement of hundreds of thousands of voters, ensuring access to polling stations, and safeguarding the capital throughout election day has historically been cited as an impossible task. This time, Somalia’s security forces met the challenge. Their performance undercut the familiar refrain that “the country is not safe” and therefore must rely on indirect elections. As former commissioner Hussein Abdi once argued, insecurity was the core justification for postponement. On this day, that argument collapsed under the weight of reality.

Perhaps the most politically significant contest, however, unfolded quietly but visibly: the standoff between ordinary voters in Mogadishu and traditional clan-based political brokers. The images were unmistakable citizens stepping forward, faces uncovered, ink-stained fingers raised before cameras, ballots confidently placed in boxes. It was an assertion of agency. Against expectations, the energized electorate prevailed, delivering a result that surprised those who assumed political behavior would remain tightly managed behind closed doors.