When Felix Tshisekedi secured Africa’s richest job in 2019, few predicted he would still be the undisputed centre of Congolese power seven years later — or that he would be engineering one of the continent’s most consequential constitutional gambits while the world watched largely passively. Yet here we are. Sources in Kinshasa and Washington alike confirm that Tshisekedi’s inner circle is working to extend his tenure past constitutional limits, leveraging wartime delays and the distraction of football to build a case for continuity that the West, for now, seems reluctant to challenge.
The strategy is audacious and, for many Congolese, familiar. Congo’s post-independence political history is littered with leaders who found creative ways to stay in power beyond their welcome. What makes Tshisekedi’s situation different is the geopolitical context: the country sits on some of the world’s most significant deposits of cobalt, coltan, and lithium — minerals that the Trump administration has identified as critical to American technological and economic security. That reality has given Kinshasa leverage it would not otherwise have.
From Football Delay to Constitutional Argument
The immediate mechanism being deployed is familiar in African politics: a wartime extension. Congo is fighting M23 rebels in the east, a conflict that has displaced hundreds of thousands and consumed enormous military and administrative resources. Tshisekedi’s supporters argue that a change of leadership in the middle of an existential security crisis would be irresponsible — a position that, on its surface, has a certain internal logic. The counter-argument, made loudly by opposition figures and civil society groups, is that the war itself has been politicised — that delays in the peace process, and the framing of the conflict as a reason for extended executive power, serve Tshisekedi’s political interests more than the country’s security interests.
The football dimension is more subtle. Congo is co-host of the 2026 World Cup alongside the United States, Mexico, and Canada. The tournament has focused international attention on Congolese sport, culture, and on the country’s global image in ways that the government has been quick to exploit. Having just hosted an extraordinary edition of the Africa Cup of Nations, Congo is in the midst of a prolonged moment of international visibility. Supporters of the extension argue this is precisely when Congo needs stable, experienced leadership — not a contested succession that could derail progress.
Washington’s Calculated Silence
The most consequential variable in the equation is American policy. President Trump’s minerals-focused foreign policy has made Congo more strategically valuable to Washington than at any point in the past two decades. That has created a dilemma for US diplomats: press Kinshasa too hard on democratic norms and risk losing access to the cobalt and coltan that power American tech and defence industries. Look the other way, and the message to African leaders more broadly is that electoral manipulation can be forgiven when it serves American economic interests.
So far, Washington has chosen measured silence. There have been no formal statements criticising constitutional irregularities. US officials have hinted privately at concerns but stopped well short of the kind of public pressure that accompanied earlier stretches in Congo’s democratic backsliding.
“The optics for the US are terrible,” one Western diplomat told The Africa Report, speaking on condition of anonymity. “But the minerals calculus is real. This isn’t the 1990s — the strategic importance of Congo’s resources has changed the cost-benefit analysis substantially.”
The Domestic Opposition’s Dilemma
Inside Congo, opposition to the third-term push is real but fragmented. The combined opposition, which has historically been the main vehicle for anti-incumbent sentiment, has struggled to find coherent messaging that resonates beyond its traditional base in Kinshasa’s middle class. Tshisekedi’s camp has been effective at painting the opposition as out of touch — metropolitan, French-speaking elites who cannot connect with the rural voters who gave the president his margin of victory in 2023.
What is clear is that the next twelve months will test Congo’s institutions in ways they have not been tested since the transition that brought Tshisekedi to power. Whether those institutions hold — or whether they bend to accommodate a third term — will have implications far beyond Congo’s borders, shaping how the international community assesses the viability of democratic governance in Africa’s most resource-rich state.