The Democratic Republic of Congo’s constitution limits presidents to two terms. That constraint, until this week, was treated as settled. Then Félix Tshisekedi signalled openness to a third term, citing the ongoing conflict in the east and warning that elections scheduled for 2028 could be complicated or delayed if insecurity persists. Opposition figures interpreted the remarks immediately as an early test of institutional guardrails already strained by years of insecurity and political distrust. They were right to do so, because the Tshisekedi third-term controversy reveals something more consequential than presidential ambition. It reveals how conflict gradually alters the constitutional environment around it.
The remarks, delivered at a press conference in Kinshasa, were carefully hedged; Tshisekedi said any extension would depend on public support and constitutional processes. But the precision of the hedge matters less than its timing and framing. Introducing the possibility of extended tenure through the language of security necessity is a recognisable move in fragile-state politics. It does not require immediate legal action to begin shifting the political environment. It requires only that the idea enter circulation, attached to a crisis, and begin to seem less exceptional than it was before.
The eastern conflict provides that crisis with extraordinary continuity. Eastern Congo’s long-running instability, involving armed groups, regional tensions, mineral competition, humanitarian displacement, and repeated accusations of foreign involvement, has become more than a security challenge. It now sits at the centre of national political calculations, shaping debates about the future form of the Congolese state itself. When war is both a recurring emergency and a permanent background condition, the political logic of emergency measures begins to erode the distinction between temporary and permanent. That erosion rarely announces itself. It accumulates.
The mechanism deserves to be stated plainly, because it is the heart of the matter. A term limit assumes a normal time in which power is handed over on schedule. Permanent war abolishes the idea of a normal time. If the country is always in emergency, then there is never a settled moment in which the handover is supposed to happen, and the incumbent can always point to the map of the east to explain why now is not the time. The constitution is not repealed; it is suspended indefinitely by circumstance. This is the quiet genius of governing through emergency: it never has to win the argument against the term limit; it only has to ensure the argument is never finally held.
Tshisekedi’s warning about election feasibility reflects a condition confronting fragile democracies more broadly: prolonged insecurity reshapes constitutional norms long before laws formally change. Emergency logic migrates from battlefield to governance structure, altering public expectations around authority, timelines, and political continuity in ways that make constitutional limits appear more negotiable than they were previously understood to be. Congo’s modern political history has demonstrated this dynamic with depressing consistency. Insecurity and institutional fragility become intertwined, and that entanglement most frequently works in favour of incumbents, not constitutions.
Who gains from the permanence and the conflict’s stubbornness becomes legible. A war that never resolves is a catastrophe for the displaced civilian and a resource for the office-holder who can invoke it. The mineral economy that funds the armed groups in the east and the political economy that benefits from indefinite tenure in the west are not the same system, but they rhyme: both convert instability into a form of capital. The opposition’s deeper fear is not a single extra term. It is that a country can be governed indefinitely by the perpetual deferral of the moment when power is supposed to change hands.
For the DRC opposition, the concern is therefore not only the prospect of a third term as such. It is the fear that wartime conditions are being deployed to create political space where constitutional limits become subjects of discussion rather than settled facts. Once the conversation begins, once the question of whether the constitution should bend to security imperatives is live, the terrain of political contestation has already shifted. The burden moves from those seeking change to demonstrate necessity, to those opposing change to demonstrate that stability is achievable without it.
The issue carries wider regional significance that extends beyond the DRC’s own political dynamics. The country occupies a central position in Central and East Africa, economically, geographically, and strategically. Prolonged uncertainty in Kinshasa distributes consequences across regional trade, security dynamics, mining supply chains, and population displacement patterns in ways that neighbouring states cannot insulate themselves from. Institutional fragility in the DRC is a regional variable, not a national one.
International partners have continued to back stabilisation efforts in the east while encouraging democratic continuity. But the gap between the formal constitutional order and operational state control in the DRC remains difficult to bridge through diplomatic encouragement alone. Elections depend on institutions that retain legitimacy and territorial reach sufficient to sustain public trust during periods of crisis. The deeper tension now facing Congo is whether its institutions can absorb sustained security pressure without the political rules constraining power becoming the first casualty of the strain. Constitutional limits are most at risk not when they are directly attacked, but when prolonged instability makes exceptions seem reasonable. That process is already underway in the DRC, and this week’s remarks have brought it one step closer to the surface.
