With a Fourth-Term Bid, Cote d’Ivoire’s Ouattara Is Playing With Fire

After months of playing coy, President Alassane Ouattara of Cote d’Ivoire announced earlier this week that he will run for a controversial fourth term in the country’s presidential election in October. In preparing the ground for his announcement, Ouattara has made Cote d’Ivoire’s economic performance central to his electoral strategy. Since he first came to power following the 2010-2011 post-election crisis that claimed over 3,000 lives, Cote d’Ivoire has experienced a remarkable economic recovery. With its real GDP growth for this year projected to reach 6.3 percent, it is now among Africa’s fastest-growing economies.

Ouattara has used his economic stewardship to portray himself more broadly as the guarantor of prosperity amid regional chaos. Cote d’Ivoire is on the front lines of a deepening divide in West Africa between the Alliance of Sahel States, or AES, and the remaining members of the Economic Community of West African States, or ECOWAS, from which the junta-led AES governments withdrew in January. With jihadist violence in the Sahel continuing to worsen, Cote d’Ivoire is managing the drawdown of French troops from its territory while entertaining U.S. interest in establishing a drone base in the northern part of the country.

As the military juntas in Mali, Burkina Faso and Niger consolidate power, deepening a crisis of legitimacy for democracies in the region and beyond, the stakes of Cote d’Ivoire’s elections extend far beyond its borders.

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