By AfriWave
Today, 15 September, marks the International Day of Democracy. Afrobarometer timed its latest Pan-Africa Profile to land on it — and reading the full 26-page report, the timing earns its weight.
For a quarter-century, Afrobarometer’s surveys have told a consistent story: Africans want more democracy than their governments deliver. That “demand exceeds supply” gap has been treated almost as a fixed feature of the continent’s politics. The new report, Policy Paper No. 106, authored by Robert Mattes, Suhaylah Peeraullee and Rehan Visser and based on 50,961 face-to-face interviews across 38 countries in 2024 and 2025, complicates that story. The gap is closing. But not because governments are delivering more democracy. It’s closing because citizens are asking for less of it.
The Numbers Behind the Shift
A majority of Africans still say, in the abstract, that they prefer democracy to any other system — 64 percent do. Most still reject the obvious alternatives: 79 percent oppose one-person rule, 76 percent oppose one-party rule, and 65 percent oppose military rule.
But Afrobarometer’s stricter measure — full “demand for democracy” — requires citizens to prefer democracy and reject all three authoritarian alternatives at once. By that standard, only 36 percent of Africans qualify as committed democrats, down from 47 percent a decade ago. The decline cuts across nearly every region: demand is roughly twice as high in East Africa (48%) as in Central Africa (23%), with West Africa (38%), North Africa (38%) and Southern Africa (29%) in between.
Country rankings run from Zambia’s 64% down to Mali’s 8% and Gabon’s 11%. Fewer than half of Africans, 47 percent, consider their own country a democracy at all, and only 38 percent say they’re satisfied with how democracy functions where they live — though even here the range is stark, from 82% positive in Tanzania to just 15% in Congo-Brazzaville.
It’s Not Only the Coup Belt That’s Slipping
The instinctive read on this story is “coup countries are giving up on democracy.” The data complicates that too. Some of the sharpest declines in full demand over the past decade have come not from military-ruled states but from the continent’s most established democracies — what the report calls “polyarchies,” countries with genuinely competitive elections and strong civil liberties as of 2016. Mauritius fell 26 points. South Africa fell 21. Namibia fell 20. Cabo Verde and São Tomé and Príncipe each fell 16.
South Africa’s case is the report’s most detailed cautionary tale. The share of South Africans who qualify as full committed democrats has collapsed from 35% a decade ago to just 14% today — the lowest of any country that hasn’t recently experienced a military coup. The decline tracks closely with collapsing trust in specific institutions: the share of South Africans who perceive electoral irregularities more than doubled, from 20% to 44%; perceptions of parliamentary corruption jumped 22 points; and perceived freedom of speech dropped 22 points over the same period. This is a story about disillusionment with a democracy that exists, not a country reaching for an alternative it’s never had.
The report’s broader diagnosis: it is disproportionately the traditionally pro-democratic — the better-educated, the urban, the economically secure, and heavy consumers of news across every platform including social media — whose commitment has eroded fastest. “It is precisely those groups who recognise and value democracy’s merits who are most likely to have become disillusioned with its failures,” the authors write. Notably, the decline is not youth-driven: drop-offs among 18-25 and 26-35 year-olds are statistically indistinguishable from those among middle-aged respondents. Only citizens over 56 have held steadier.
The 80% Line
The report’s most striking finding, buried two-thirds of the way through, is also its most useful one for understanding Africa’s coup wave: analysing every Afrobarometer survey round since 2005, the researchers find there has never been a successful coup in a country where public opposition to military rule stood above 80 percent — countries like Zambia, Uganda, Botswana, Eswatini, Kenya and Senegal today.
By contrast, every recent coup was preceded by opposition to military rule sitting meaningfully below that line: 76% in Guinea and 75% in Zimbabwe before their interventions, 70% in Gabon in 2021, 64% and 61% in Mali’s two most recent coup cycles, just 50% in Sudan in 2018, and a striking 33% in Egypt in 2013 — the last Afrobarometer reading before Mohamed Morsi’s removal. Statistically, each additional percentage point of public opposition to military rule reduced the odds of a coup occurring within the following three years by close to 10 percent, a relationship the authors found significant across multiple survey rounds.
Read together with the specific numbers today — 65% average rejection of military rule, but only 21% in Gabon and 20% in Mali post-coup, and worryingly low readings of 40-42% in Togo, Tunisia and South Africa — the report is close to naming a warning zone rather than simply describing a mood.
There’s a second layer worth AfriWave readers’ attention: even where Africans reject military rule as a permanent system, a slim majority (55%) say they’d tolerate a military intervention specifically if elected leaders were abusing their power — rising to 89% in Gabon and 85% in Mali before their own coups. Most, however, want any such intervention short-lived: 39% want civilian rule restored “as soon as possible,” versus just 21% comfortable with prolonged military rule.
Why It’s Happening
The authors are explicit that this isn’t ideological drift away from democracy as a value — it’s disappointment with performance. Across the 30 countries tracked over the decade, citizens report sharply worsening views on the specifics: perceptions that presidents “often or always” ignore the law or Parliament are each up 12 points; the belief that recent elections were not free and fair is up 11 points; perceived impunity for ordinary criminals is up 9 points; and perceived freedom to speak openly is down 7 points. Every one of these factors showed a statistically significant relationship with falling demand for democracy in the report’s regression analysis.
There’s also a demographic undertow. The groups that have historically anchored pro-democratic sentiment — full-time workers, the economically secure, frequent consumers of print and broadcast news — have shrunk as a share of the population even as their individual commitment weakened, doubly squeezing overall demand. Radio listenership specifically has fallen 11 points over the decade even as it remains the one news source still associated with stronger democratic commitment; social media use has grown 28 points even as its heaviest users show among the steepest declines in demand.
What It Means for the Diaspora
For AfriWave’s community, this report cuts two ways. It confirms a familiar story about coup-belt states like Mali and Gabon, where openness to military rule spiked sharply right after the takeovers — though the authors caution this may partly reflect short-term “honeymoon” effects or fear of expressing dissent under a new junta, not settled opinion. But it also delivers a less comfortable finding for readers watching from South Africa, Namibia, Mauritius or Cabo Verde: some of the fastest-eroding faith in democracy is happening in countries diaspora communities think of as success stories, driven by the same disillusionment with corruption, impunity, and hollow elections that pushes people toward authoritarian alternatives everywhere else.
The report’s authors don’t end on despair. They note that demand still exceeds supply in most countries, meaning there remain large numbers of what they call “critical” or “dissatisfied democrats” — citizens still pushing for something better rather than having given up. And they close with a pointed observation: coups are “rarely attempted, and rarely successful, when an overwhelming majority of the population oppose military rule.” Democratic resilience, in other words, is still substantially in African publics’ own hands — but the margin protecting it has grown thinner than it was ten years ago.
Reader, on International Day of Democracy: does the 80% threshold change how you think about which countries are actually at risk — including ones you might not have expected?
Source: Robert Mattes, Suhaylah Peeraullee and Rehan Visser, “Democracy: Faltering Demand in Africa?” Afrobarometer Policy Paper No. 106, September 2026, based on 50,961 face-to-face interviews across 38 countries in 2024/2025. Full report: afrobarometer.org.
