By Dr Aweys O. Mohamoud

Somalia stands at the precipice of a quiet but profound democratic reversal. In Galmudug today and echoing earlier maneuvers in Baidoa and South West State—former president Hassan Sheikh Mohamud (HSM) and his allies are not merely engaging in routine political competition. They are executing a systematic erosion of federalism and constitutional norms through what Milan W. Svolik would precisely diagnose as an incumbent takeover.

Recent moves—disempowering key figures like Mahad Salad by redirecting NISA units to report directly to an official aligned with Villa Somalia (Macalin Yusuf), backing controversial challenger Liban Shuluq against incumbent President Abdi Kariye Qoor-Qoor, and fueling internal divisions among aggrieved leaders such as Hamza Barre—fit a clear pattern of fragmentation followed by coercive control. This is an incremental dismantling of Somalia’s fragile constitutional order from within the executive itself.

These events demand more than journalistic reporting. They require the sharp lens of democratic theory to reveal what is truly at stake.

Theoretical Benchmarks: Huntington and Gasiorowski on When Democracy Endures

In the scholarly literature on democratic consolidation, two influential operational tests stand out for assessing whether a democracy has become “the only game in town.”

Samuel P. Huntington’s two-turnover test, introduced in The Third Wave (1991), holds that a democracy consolidates only when power has peacefully transferred twice between competing parties or elites via free and fair elections. The first turnover may be fragile or exceptional; the second proves that both incumbents and opposition have internalized the rules of the game—that losing office is temporary, not existential. Without this elite-level behavioral commitment, democracy remains unconsolidated.

Mark J. Gasiorowski’s twelve-year threshold offers a complementary, time-based metric rooted in empirical patterns across datasets: most democratic breakdowns occur within the first decade. Survival beyond roughly ten to twelve years—spanning multiple electoral cycles—dramatically lowers the probability of collapse. Longevity signals that elites, citizens, and institutions have adapted to democratic competition and that the regime has begun to institutionalize.

Somalia meets neither benchmark. Its federal democratic experiment, anchored in the 2012 provisional constitution, remains young. Peaceful, competitive turnovers at the federal level have been rare and contested. More critically, the current trajectory shows not adaptation to democratic rules but their active subversion. Incumbent maneuvers that bypass or manipulate federal-state relations, security institutions, and electoral mandates reveal a political class that has not accepted electoral uncertainty as the price of democratic legitimacy.

Svolik’s Crucial Insight: Incumbent Takeovers as the Enduring Threat

Milan W. Svolik’s groundbreaking analysis in “Which Democracies Will Last? Coups, Incumbent Takeovers, and the Dynamic of Democratic Consolidation” (2014) provides the most precise analytical framework for Somalia’s crisis. Using a change-point model on democratic survival data, Svolik demonstrates that consolidation is not a uniform process. Democracies do consolidate against one classic threat—military coups—showing a statistically significant, durable drop in coup risk after a certain point in their lifespan. But they do not reliably consolidate against incumbent takeovers. The risk of authoritarian reversal by those already in power persists even in supposedly “consolidated” systems.

This distinction is not academic nitpicking. Coups are overt ruptures; incumbent takeovers are insidious, cloaked in the language of legality, reform, or “national interest.” They exploit existing institutions—executive authority over security forces, constitutional amendment processes, and control of patronage networks—to erode checks and balances from within. Svolik’s data show that factors like presidentialism and resource rents (fuel exports in his cases) heighten vulnerability to this mode of breakdown precisely because they concentrate power in the executive.

Somalia’s current crisis maps directly onto this model. HSM’s two-pillar strategy—fragmentation (using federal ministers, financial incentives, and proxies to sow division inside member states) followed by force (redeploying security institutions and undermining regional autonomy)—is textbook incumbent takeover. Redirecting NISA loyalty away from established chains of command, meddling in Galmudug’s internal leadership contests, and repeating the playbook previously deployed in Baidoa are not isolated incidents. They represent a deliberate centralization of power that hollows out federalism, the very cornerstone of Somalia’s constitutional settlement.

As Svolik warns, new democracies are especially vulnerable here because the mechanisms that deter coups (civilian control of the military, elite pacts) do not automatically constrain incumbents who control the state apparatus itself. The veneer of constitutionalism—amendments, “reforms,” or security pretexts—makes this form of reversal harder to resist and easier to legitimize internationally.

The Ground Reality: Galmudug as the Latest Front

The latest reports from Galmudug confirm the pattern. Mahad Salad, a figure with deep regional ties and influence, has been effectively sidelined as NISA operations are rerouted. President Qoor-Qoor has voiced public grievance over Villa Somalia’s interference in local politics. Allies like Hamza Barre are reportedly alienated by the overt backing of Liban Shuluq. These are not organic local disputes; they are engineered fractures designed to weaken coordinated regional resistance.

This follows the same logic applied earlier in Baidoa. The strategy is consistent: divide, discredit, dominate. The goal is clear—to neutralize potential checks on federal executive power ahead of any future electoral or constitutional contestation. In a country still recovering from decades of state fragility, such moves do not merely test democratic norms; they risk collapsing the federal bargain that has prevented outright disintegration.

Why This Matters—and What Comes Next

If left unchecked, these actions will not produce a stronger central state. They will produce a more brittle, personalized authoritarian regime masquerading as democratic continuity. Huntington’s insight remains prophetic: without repeated, peaceful turnovers that demonstrate elite commitment, democracy never becomes self-reinforcing. Gasiorowski’s threshold reminds us that time alone does not heal fragility when incumbents actively undermine institutions. And Svolik’s evidence is unambiguous: incumbent takeovers are the mode of breakdown that even “surviving” democracies fail to outgrow.

Somalia does not need another cycle of elite pacts that paper over authoritarian ambition. It needs sustained, principled resistance—within parliament, within the judiciary where it still functions, and above all through popular civic mobilization in Mogadishu and across the Federal Member States. As I recently framed it in an X post, the only remaining remedy short of armed confrontation may be “sustained popular mobilization and mass civic action aimed at forcing [HSM’s] removal from Villa Somalia.”

The constitutional order is not abstract. It is the fragile architecture holding Somalia’s federal experiment together. An incumbent takeover does not announce itself with tanks in the streets. It announces itself through redirected intelligence loyalties, manufactured local crises, and the steady narrowing of democratic space. In Somalia, that announcement has already been made.

The question now is whether the country’s elites, citizens, and international partners will recognize it for what it is—and act before the window for democratic recovery closes.

Dr. Aweys O Mohamoud
Email: aweys6@aol.com
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References:
1) Gasiorowski, Mark J. 1995. Economic Crisis and Political Regime Change: An Event History Analysis. American Political Science Review 89 (4):882–97.
2) Huntington, Samuel P. 1993. The Third Wave: Demoratization in the Late Twentieth Century. Norman, Okla.: University of Oklahoma Press.
3) Svolik, Milan W. (2014) Which Democracies Will Last? Coups, Incumbent Takeovers, and the Dynamic of Democratic Consolidation, British Journal of Political Science 45, 715–738, Cambridge University Press.