General Elections, 27 November 2024

On 27 November 2024, Namibia held general elections for both the president and the parliament. Namibia uses a two-round system for the presidential election in which a runoff round will occur if no one candidate secures more than 50 per cent of the vote. The presidential term is five years. 96 MPs are elected via closed list proportional representation, while eight are appointed by the president (AU 2024).

The responsible election management body, the Electoral Commission of Namibia (ECN), made the decision before the election to allow citizens to vote at any polling location – on presenting a valid voter registration card from the 2024 General Registration of Voters) (ECN 2024). A strong turnout was expected, given that 90 per cent of the 1.4 million eligible voters had so registered (Groenewald 2024).

On election day, numerous logistical and operational challenges emerged. ECN acknowledged these to include electronic voter registration devices being paused due to overheating; insufficient batteries for (ultraviolet) voter verification torches; and insufficient ballot paper (Groenewald 2024; Al Jazeera 2024). Long queues led the ECN—controversially—to extend voting at some polling stations to 29 and 30 November. The extensions drew accusations of fraud from the main opposition party (AP 2024), amid claims that they were inconsistently applied (Groenewald 2024). This came against a background of low trust in the electoral body as indicated by an Afrobarometer survey released earlier in the year (Links 2024).  

The Independent Patriots for Change Party (IPC) and the Landless People’s Movement (LPM) contested the elections in court, also on grounds of timing (not on a public holiday) and insufficient election materials (Angula 2024; Fröhlich 2024). The election results were made official on 3 December 2024. The Electoral Court ruled later in December that the IPC and LPM could access the electoral materials to examine them for supposed irregularities (Angula 2024), before dismissal of the case by the Supreme Court on 28 February 2025 (Nyaungwa 2025).

Voter turnout was 76.05 per cent compared to 60.82 per cent in 2019 (International IDEA n.d.). Netumbo Nandi-Ndaitwah of the ruling South West Africa People’s Organization (SWAPO) won the election in the first round with approximately 57 per cent of the vote, continuing the party’s 34 years in power. She is the first female president of Namibia and alongside Tanzania's Samia Suluhu Hassan is one of only two female presidents in Africa. In the parliamentary election, SWAPO won 51 of 96 seats, holding on to its slim majority but losing 12 seats from the previous election (Fröhlich 2024). 39 of the 96 elected MPs (40.6 per cent) were women (IPU n.d.).