Mogadishu (Somalia Today) – Somalia’s opposition has spent months accusing President Hassan Sheikh Mohamud of unilateralism, constitutional overreach, and trying to bend the electoral system to his advantage.
Much of that criticism has carried weight in a fractured political climate.
But by rushing to congratulate Abdiaziz Hassan Mohamed Laftagareen after Saturday’s rushed and disputed “self-re-election” in South West state, opposition leaders weakened one of their strongest arguments against the president.
At a moment that called for principle, many chose factional loyalty instead.
The weekend vote in Baidoa was not simply another round in Somalia’s endless elite rivalry. It was a political test.
It tested whether the opposition’s rhetoric about legality, consensus, and fair process still applied when the beneficiary was one of its own allies.
A rushed process
The timeline of the South West election raised immediate alarm.
The regional parliament’s new membership was unveiled overnight. The chamber then moved quickly to re-elect Ali Said Fiqi as speaker before handing Laftagareen another term on the same day.
Election officials declared Laftagareen the winner with 66 votes in a process that even sympathetic observers described as rushed and disputed.
The contradiction becomes sharper when measured against the opposition’s own recent declarations.
In January 2025, former president Sharif Sheikh Ahmed warned the federal government against holding a “one-sided election” and called for broad dialogue.
By November 2025, he went further, saying that “the only legitimate way to amend the Constitution is through a national consensus”.
The following month, Sharif rejected Mogadishu’s direct-election plan, arguing that the electoral commission lacked national acceptance and basic transparency standards.
Those were not minor procedural complaints. It was a claim about political legitimacy itself.
Factional loyalty
Yet when Laftagareen moved ahead with his own controversial electoral track, Sharif’s camp shifted from procedural scepticism to political endorsement.
On March 23, the Himilo Qaran party backed South West’s right to appoint its own electoral bodies and warned the federal government against interference.
After Saturday’s rapid vote, former president Mohamed Abdullahi Mohamed, better known as Farmaajo, congratulated Laftagareen. Sharif and former prime minister Hassan Ali Khaire also welcomed the result.
The same opposition that argued national acceptance and transparency were essential in Mogadishu appear willing to set those tests aside in Baidoa.
That shift carries a clear political cost.
An opposition earns credibility not only by resisting power, but by applying the same standard to allies and rivals alike.
If Hassan Sheikh cannot lawfully push ahead with an electoral model that lacks consensus, then Laftagareen should not be applauded for a one-day parliamentary choreography that many Somalis viewed as pre-cooked.
Logic vs. maturity
There is, of course, a clear political logic behind the opposition’s stance.
South West suspended ties with Mogadishu on March 17, accusing the federal government of arming militias and trying to unseat Laftagareen. Commercial flights between the two cities were halted, and rival troops have mobilised.
From the opposition’s point of view, this is a struggle against federal encroachment and an attempt by Villa Somalia to break regional autonomy before the crucial 2026 national elections.
But political logic is not the same as political maturity.
A mature opposition could have done two things at once. It could have rejected federal coercion while refusing to bless a flawed regional process.
By failing to demand a credible and transparent election in Baidoa, the opposition surrendered much of its constitutional high ground and handed the president’s camp an easy counter-argument: that its real objection was never to imposed politics, only to who was doing the imposing.
Elastic language
The episode also shows how elastic Somalia’s political language has become.
In December 2025, Laftagareen himself praised Mogadishu residents for taking part in a historic one-person-one-vote local election, calling it a sign of “political maturity”.
Universal suffrage is celebrated when it suits one moment, while an ultra-compressed indirect vote is defended when it suits the next.
The stakes are high. Parliament recently approved constitutional changes that critics say could extend Hassan Sheikh’s term and delay the 2026 elections.
Opposition complaints about those federal reforms remain serious. But they lose force when the same actors applaud a hurried regional vote that falls well short of the standards they demand elsewhere.
With the federal order under strain and the Al-Shabaab insurgency still entrenched, the opposition’s missed opportunity in Baidoa matters for more than optics.
It suggests that, for much of Somalia’s political class, principle still bends too easily before political convenience.
