Intel Brief: Coup in Guinea-Bissau

casper4871
3 hours ago
4 min read

Date: 27/11/2025 (12:00 UTC+01:00)

Where?

Guinea-Bissau; Bissau

What happened?

On 23/11/2025, the West-African nation Guinea-Bissau held presidential and legislative elections. If the incumbent Umaro Sissoco Embaló would manage to become re-elected, he would be the first president in Guinea-Bissau to do so in about three decades.
Tensions surrounding the elections had been simmering for a while. On 31/10/2025, a group of senior officers in the country’s army was arrested overnight. They were accused of plotting to undermine the constitutional order, and disrupt the November elections.
Then later, just two days before the elections on 13/11/2025, the president of the the African Party for the Independence of Guinea and Cape Verde (PAIGC) - the party which led the armed struggle for liberation in 1973 and had been dominant in the country’s politics for decades - was banned from running in the elections. This ban of the most serious opposition party essentially cleared the way for Embaló to win last weekend’s elections.
Shortly after the elections on 24/11/2025, Embaló as well as his main challenger who did manage to run in the elections - Fernando Dias - both claimed victory on Monday ahead of the publication of the official results, each claiming over half the vote.
Then in the morning of 26/11/2025, gunfire was reported near the presidential palace in Bissau. Roads to the palace were reportedly closed with checkpoints manned by heavily armed and masked soldiers. Shooting was also heard near the Interior Ministry and National Electoral Commission, which led to hundreds of people fleeing.
That same day around 13:00 UTC, President Embaló was arrested with resistance by a group of soldiers led by his army chief of staff. Nothing was heard from him for a while until the French magazine Jeune Afrique got a phone call from Embaló in which he announced that he was deposed by the army.
That same afternoon, several other high-ranking army officers loyal to Embaló were arrested. Also detained were Interior Minister Botche Candé, opposition leader Fernando Dias, PAIGC’s previous electoral candidate Domingos Pereira and the head of the country’s electoral commission.
Later on 26/11/2025, military officers led by General Denis N’Canha, former head of the presidential guard, appeared on state TV broadcasting from the army headquarters. They announced that they - the newly announced ‘High Military Command for the Restoration of Order’ had taken “total control” over the country.
Additionally, they announced a curfew starting at 19:00 UTC, the suspension of political institutions, media and electoral processes. Guinea-Bissau’s borders were closed too. According to coup leader N’Canha, this was because of a discovered plot by politicians, foreign figures and a ‘drug lord’ to manipulate election results.
International responses followed. Later at night on 26/11/2025, Portugal’s MFA called “on all those involved to refrain from any act of institutional or civic violence and to resume the regular functioning of institutions, so that the process of counting and proclaiming the election results can be finalized”. West Africa’s ECOWAS and the African Union also expressed concern over the military takeover.

Analysis and conclusion

The latest coup in Guinea-Bissau is far from the first in the West-African country, which has seen at least nine coups or coup attempts since gaining independence from Portugal in 1974. No president has been able to secure re-election in three decades, a pattern that reflects the country’s inability to enjoy political stability and perpetuates a cycle of political unrest. Now-deposed former President Embaló said himself that he survived multiple coup attempts upon becoming president of the nation in 2020.

Yet this coup was hardly unexpected. Tensions had been brewing for a while, as President Embaló had increasingly been trying to centralize power in the country. He pushed to expand presidential powers and dissolved the parliament in December 2023 following clashes between several factions of the country’s armed forces, which the president describes as a coup. Elections were then delayed several times for security reasons: initially planned for late 2024 and eventually rescheduled for November 2025. The military, which has been an influential institution in Guinea-Bissau for long, did not take a liking to Embaló’s centralizing tendencies. Embaló's decision to detain several military officials on 31/10/2025 likely only added fuel to this fire. Notwithstanding if the officers implicated actually had coup plans, it only deteriorated the relationship between Guinea-Bissau’s president and the armed forces.

Aside from that, last weekend’s elections also undermined Embaló’s power base and popular mandate. The exclusion of the PAIGC from the polls - two days before the elections were set to take place - seriously distorted the political playing field and fuelled widespread distrust. By sidelining the party which was the most serious challenge to his power, and won two legislative elections in 2019 and 2023 he and his government undermined their legitimacy and created a situation in which a positive outcome is practically impossible. Winning this year’s November elections would likely be widely considered as an engineered victory, rather than a genuine popular mandate. Taken together, this week’s coup against President Umaro Sissoco Embaló comes as no surprise. Last weekend's election served less as the cause than as a trigger - a moment of vulnerability during which the military executed plans likely long in development.

Guinea-Bissau now faces several difficulties for the future. The country’s leadership needs to find a way to rebuild trust in its political institutions, which is not as easy as simply switching leadership. The military and civilian branches of government must forge a new working relationship to break this cycle that has plagued the nation since independence. Complicating matters even further, Guinea-Bissau faces serious external challenges. The country is a critical transit point for drug trafficking between Latin America and Europe, with cocaine shipments regularly passing through its poorly monitored coastline and the Bijagos Archipelago. This fuels corruption at all levels of government and systematically undermines state institutions, making meaningful reform even more difficult to achieve. How the new leadership in Bissau plans to tackle these complex problems remains to be seen. For now, Guinea-Bissau faces a future of uncertainty.