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What Is Happening in Guinea-Bissau?

REPORTING  |  GUINEA-BISSAU

The military seized power in Guinea-Bissau in November, right after the election. One of the election observers was Nigeria's former president Goodluck Jonathan, who believes what happened is a ceremonial coup. Klas Lundström reports from the country where the median age is 19 years and neoliberal IMF programs have succeeded one another.

Political chaos paralyzes Guinea-Bissau. The country's military deposed President Umaro Sissoco Embaló on Wednesday, November 26, 2025, a few days after 65 percent of the country's voters went to the polls to, among other things, choose the country's next leader—and on the same day the election results were to be announced. Instead, the political table was overturned, all pieces fell in different directions. It is unclear who will clean up after all this chaos.

The only thing we know for certain is that the military has seized power in Guinea-Bissau. How, what, and why a coup d'état took place in the West African nation on November 26 is shrouded in darkness, although suspicions of political duplicity dominate the post-coup analysis.

External actors with interests ranging from drug trafficking to oil prospecting pull at the country's various political factions at the expense of a severely battered local population. We also know that the deposed president Umaro Sissoco Embaló and Fernando Dias da Costa (Embaló's main opponent in the presidential election on November 23, 2025) are in exile.

"I have been deposed," Embaló announced to the television station France24 by telephone a few days after the coup.¹

Embaló proclaimed himself winner in a disputed 2019 election after a campaign dominated by seconds-long clips on social media and then ignored the opposition's criticism about electoral fraud. The fact that neither the Supreme Court nor parliament approved the election results did not stop Embaló either, who instead swore himself in as the new president at a luxury hotel in the capital Bissau.²

Coup-Densed Independence

Since independence in 1974, Guinea-Bissau has endured five coups d'état and a handful of coup attempts. The first reports after the November 2025 coup established a narrative around Embaló as an election victory-oriented statesman who was abruptly deposed and placed under house arrest by the country's grasping military.³

Despite house arrest and military threats, it soon emerged that Embaló left Guinea-Bissau on the same day he was overthrown and the interim government, led by General Horta Inta-A Na Man, was installed. Neighboring Senegal provided Embaló with a specially chartered plane. With his own private plane, Embaló landed a few days later in Congo-Brazzaville.⁴

While Embaló traveled around the African continent, representatives from human rights organizations, media houses, educational institutions, and other society-supporting professional groups were forced to go underground in their homeland.⁵

"Ceremonial Coup"

The capital along the Congo River was, however, only an intermediate destination. In the first week of December, Embaló reached Morocco's capital Rabat, where he reportedly sought asylum. Here on the threshold of Europe, he also took the opportunity to criticize Guinea-Bissau's former colonial master.⁶ But the same country is also said to have been behind his deposition, Embaló proclaimed: at least in the form of its indifference to the coup in the country's former "sphere of interest" and the fact that Embaló is of Muslim faith.⁷

A diversionary maneuver, critics say, intended to draw attention to Embaló's person and portray him as a victim when the coup itself is what really needs to be illuminated and contextualized.

"It was a ceremonial coup," said Goodluck Jonathan, Nigerian ex-president and election observer in Guinea-Bissau in November 2025. "Who's fooling whom? We are moving backward to a time when the military in Guinea-Bissau could do whatever it wanted—this is totally unacceptable."⁸

If it was a "ceremonial coup"—which other voices also claim—greater pressure is placed on Embaló, whose years in the presidential office have led Guinea-Bissau in an increasingly authoritarian direction. Embaló is not only at the center of a political tragedy where an election has been annulled by the military, but where the election itself was strongly questioned in advance, because the country's anticolonial movement PAIGC ("African Party for the Independence of Guinea and Cape Verde"), formed in the 1950s, was excluded from the political process.⁹

Suppressed Popular Movement

Now all election data appears to be destroyed, Embaló finds himself in no man's land, his main opponent (who was also allowed to leave the country) Fernando Dias da Costa has been granted asylum in Nigeria—while PAIGC's leader Domingos Simões Pereira is being held behind lock and key after being refused permission to run in the election.¹⁰

"He has become the latest in a line of political prisoners in Guinea-Bissau," says a source who wishes to remain anonymous regarding background, profession, and location. "PAIGC is increasingly being erased from Guinea-Bissau's political everyday life—soon they will probably also erase the movement from the historiography."

The fact that the election results cannot be announced makes it possible for Embaló to cling to the idea of being a popularly elected leader who was overthrown—and not a loser to the opposition he has gone a long way to undermine. It is clear that previous coup-like incidents—2022 and 2023—have been used as an excuse and pretext to concentrate the presidential office at the seat of absolute power, whose office is guarded by loyal army units.

Absolute Power, Extreme Poverty, and IMF Loans

Embaló cemented power by dissolving legislative assemblies, refusing to call new elections, cracking down hard on access to social media (platforms he himself exploited brilliantly to win young voters' attention in 2019), and ordered the army to take over television stations and tasked the Ministry of Interior with implementing "brigades" that would "monitor radio programs and arrest people who appeared insulting" to political power.

He has also managed to inflame religious tensions, which create social barriers between inhabitants.¹¹

– In recent years, people have disappeared, reports a source. Many young people who are simply kidnapped by the military or armed gangs and disappear, sometimes in the middle of the night.

Colonial Structures ...

With a population of 2 million inhabitants, a median age of 19.5 years, and a poverty increase that keeps half the population in an existence below the poverty line, it is clear that Guinea-Bissau needs political stability, infrastructure investments, a varied labor market, and hope for the future, which is met by a reality where Embaló tried to conjure the people's applause through an already proven trick—neoliberalism.¹²

In accordance with an agreement with the International Monetary Fund (IMF), the public sector was slimmed down to anorexic levels, hiring freezes were introduced, wage increases were made impossible, and social expenditures were reduced thanks to a phase-out system of subsidy packages that a series of PAIGC-led governments had defended as self-evident rights in a country trying to lift itself out of a poverty grave prepared by Portuguese colonialism's imposed economic models and short-term export crops (primarily cashews).

In the mid-1980s, aid constituted the main part of the state budget at the same time as Latin American drug cartels gradually began looking across the Atlantic for new markets.¹³

... Neoliberal Structural Adjustment Programs

At the same time—1986—the PAIGC government liberalized the economy and opened the door to the World Bank and IMF, which soon preached the gospel of structural adjustment programs to a politically pressured regime. But although IMF policy contributed to quick cash to spread over various earmarked projects, the PAIGC opposition pointed out the unsustainability of the short-term policy—and the fact that the loan would have to be repaid with income from something.¹⁴

When Guinea-Bissau was thrown into a bloody civil war in the late 1990s as a result of a coup d'état, experts also spoke of the death blow to the best economic period in the young independent nation's history. But the long-term challenges had not been erased for that reason, mainly represented by the lack of educated professional groups as a result of domestic political failures and a Portuguese colonial apparatus that kept generation after generation away from school benches.

In 2001, economics professors and Africa experts Renato Aguilar and Åsa Stenman summarized Guinea-Bissau's thousand sorrows, challenges, and opportunities in a universal and timeless truth:

"Growth and development without equality is especially dangerous for poor and small countries."¹⁵

Migration—A Way Out

The latest austerity phase under Embaló's rule in the 2020s has not succeeded in bridging the gap between failing economic growth and continued high inflation. Not even the IMF's own analyses, written before the military takeover, are positive: with continued concentration on and dependence on cashew exports, Guinea-Bissau's economy will stagnate during the 2030s, something expected to coincide with increasingly precarious cultivation conditions for cashew producers—many of whom are small-scale farmers whose livelihood is intertwined with the cashew—in the climate crisis's towering whirlwind.¹⁶

The only way out for many, especially young people, is therefore migration. Both to seek better living conditions elsewhere and to support those left behind. In 2024 alone, remittances from Guinea-Bissau guest workers and temporary workers corresponded to over 11 percent of the country's total GDP, a decrease from the previous year—itself a consequence of a repressive migration policy in the EU.¹⁷

Crossing the threshold into the former colonial master's power center—Lisbon—has proven increasingly difficult for citizens of the Portuguese-speaking "Lusophone" commonwealth CPLP, despite policy documents claiming the opposite. In September 2025, 41 Guinea-Bissau students were denied entry to Portugal, despite documents proving they were enrolled in courses at various universities. The measure confirms Portugal's repressive trend and view of non-Europeans, who are described by the far-right party Chega! ("Enough!") as less valuable and not worthy of a place in the Europe of the future (which is in line with other far-right parties in Europe, including the Sweden Democrats).¹⁸

Everyday Life in Fortress Europe

In April 2024, in connection with the celebration of the 50th anniversary of Portugal's "Carnation Revolution" that deposed the fascist regime "Estado Novo," I met some Guinea-Bissau migrants staying illegally in a suburb of Lisbon. They share the years in Europe, far from home, but in a context with which, according to their colonial history and linguistic ties, they feel they should feel some kind of belonging. Few have experience of as many widely different professions and work tasks as they do. One job worse paid than the other.¹⁹

"But what can we do?" asks a man in his late thirties. "We can't exactly negotiate conditions or wages."

The far-right Chega's advance in elections, social media, and in media narratives has made African people social targets for people's anxiety about Portugal's poor economy and uncertain future prospects.²⁰

In Guinea-Bissau, the military holds onto power until they deem it appropriate to hand it over to someone they can trust. Whether Embaló has really staged a "ceremonial" coup to avoid an electoral defeat, go into imaginary exile, and then hope to return to his homeland and assume the role of "national unifying force" remains to be seen. What is clear is that the situation for the population is acute and the misery profound. Coup or not, the realpolitik structures remain intact: rooted in a vertical exercise of power where power's inner rooms remain locked and out of reach for those waiting for a train somewhere outside Lisbon.

"The future?" says a Guinea-Bissau native on his way to a day job in the construction sector and laughs. "We're talking about Africa—and the only future we've ever had is the one we have under our feet."

Footnotes

1. 1. 1. 1. France24 27/11.
         2. Amoah 2021, pp. 314–324; AFP 2020.
         3. Jaló 2023, pp. 1–10; Reuters news agency (27/11) published an exemplary summary of the country's coups and alleged coup attempts.
         4. Al-Jazeera 29/11; France24 27/11; Jeune Afrique 3/12.
         5. Interviews with sources who wish to remain strictly anonymous.
         6. Jeune Afrique 3/12; Faouzi 3/12.
         7. Rodrigues 2025.
         8. Iroele 2025.
         9. AP 27/11; BBC 27/11.
         10. Magee 2025; Ewokor 2025; Kulkarni 2025.
         11. VOA/AFP 2024; Nogueira 2025; Reporters Without Borders country report 2025.
         12. Chin 2025; World Bank 2025.
         13. MacQueen 2006; van Riper 2014.
         14. Aguilar & Stenman 1997.
         15. Aguilar & Stenman 2001, p. 50.
         16. World Bank 2024; Drammeh, Cham, Gaye & Sinyang 2024; IMF 2024.
         17. UN 2024; Global Economy/World Bank 2025; Zarhloule 2025.
         18. Barreiros 2025; Portugal Post 3/12.
         19. Curington 2023.
         20. Lundström 2024 & 2024a.

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