Uganda’s 2026 Elections: Rising Authoritarianism and Declining U.S. Engagement

Commentary by Cameron Hudson

Published September 16, 2025

As Uganda approaches its January 2026 general elections, the country's political landscape bears a troubling resemblance to previous electoral cycles, but with an intensified authoritarianism that signals a deepening crisis of democratic governance.

President Yoweri Museveni, now 80 years old and in power for four decades, is poised to secure a seventh consecutive term after being nominated in July 2025 as the sole candidate to represent his ruling National Resistance Movement (NRM) in next year's election. But what makes 2026 particularly concerning is not just the continuation of familiar authoritarian tactics, but their systematic escalation and the regime's increasingly brazen disregard for democratic norms, coupled with a lack of any international response.

The Institutional Capture Playbook

The 2026 election cycle reveals how effectively Museveni's NRM has perfected the art of "competitive authoritarianism." The political environment is already heating up and is likely to grow even more hostile toward opponents of President Museveni's long-standing rule, as well as media outlets and civil society organizations perceived to be critical of the regime. In recent months, opposition leaders have faced escalating harassment, including arbitrary arrests and detentions on politically motivated charges.

Meanwhile, civil society organizations are coming under increasing pressure, with tighter regulations and heightened surveillance aimed at curbing their ability to influence and comment on the political process. At the same time, the regime continues to exploit the power of incumbency by mobilizing state resources for Museveni's campaign, manipulating public institutions, and restricting access to media and public spaces to further entrench the NRM's dominance and suppress dissent ahead of the elections. This stacked deck suggests that a Museveni victory may be approaching the category of a foregone conclusion. What remains unsettled, however, is how the public and political opposition will respond.

To this end, the regime's approach to opposition parties follows a well-established pattern of systematic weakening rather than outright banning. Recent months have witnessed the abduction of opposition figures, including former presidential candidate Kizza Besigye, who was kidnapped in Kenya late last year and secretly repatriated to face treason charges. More recently, in late August, opposition activist and parliamentary candidate, Sam Mugumya, was abducted by plainclothes security officers and is reportedly still being held incommunicado in an undisclosed detention facility near Kampala.

Similarly, journalists and opposition leaders have faced escalating harassment, including arbitrary arrests and detentions on politically motivated charges. This extraterritorial reach demonstrates the regime's expanding confidence in operating beyond any legal constraints or fearing much galvanizing public outcry.

The ruling party has also introduced new mechanisms to limit political competition from within. In April, Museveni's NRM introduced a requirement for aspiring candidates to sign pledges vowing they would not run as independents if they lost their party's primary votes. So, while independent MPs have grown from 37 in 2006 to 69 in the current parliament, more than the main opposition National Unity Platform's 57 seats. By forcing party members to pledge against running as independents, the NRM seeks to eliminate this safety valve that has allowed the last remaining modicum of political pluralism within the system to survive.

Civil Society Under Siege

The systematic targeting of civil society organizations represents another familiar yet intensifying pattern in this election cycle. Civil society organizations are under increasing pressure, with tighter regulations and heightened surveillance aimed at curbing their ability to influence the political process. This crackdown has been particularly evident in the regime's hostile response to international diplomatic engagement with opposition groups.

The recent diplomatic crisis with the European Union illustrates how President Museveni's government has expanded its authoritarian reach to include intimidation of the international community. When EU diplomats met with opposition leader Bobi Wine to discuss human rights violations and his presidential ambitions, the government accused EU member states of meddling in domestic affairs and funding the opposition. General Muhoozi Kainerugaba, the president's son and current chief of the Uganda People's Defence Force, escalated tensions by threatening to expel EU diplomats, declaring he had "marked all those diplomats," and going so far as to accuse Germany's ambassador of "subversive acts" and being "wholly unqualified" to remain in his post. Muhoozi further boasted about detaining opposition activists in his "basement," a widely recognized euphemism for torture in Uganda, and threatening Wine with similar detention and torture, promising, "you are next."

This diplomatic confrontation and overt threats reveal the regime's growing brazenness in challenging international oversight, a marked departure from earlier periods when Uganda was more sensitive to external criticism due to its dependence on foreign aid.

The Militarization of Politics

At the center of Uganda's violence trajectory is General Muhoozi Kainerugaba, whose rise represents a steady militarization of politics in Uganda. As chief of the Uganda People's Defence Force, Muhoozi holds the highest position in Uganda's military hierarchy, yet he has openly engaged in partisan politics in ways that blur the lines between military service and political ambition.

Muhoozi's conduct further suggests a breakdown of civilian oversight over the military and the unchecked power of the Museveni family. He has openly defied parliamentary summons, dismissively vowing never to appear before what he called clowns, and even threatened to arrest members of the parliamentary committee that summoned him. When the Uganda Human Rights Commission issued a release order for an abducted opposition figure, Muhoozi responded with defiance and hostility, tweeting threats and demanding an apology. This pattern of impunity extends to his public threats against opposition leaders, including a recent social media post, since deleted, about Bobi Wine stating: "If [President Museveni] was not there, I would cut off his head today." Similarly, he has publicly threatened to "deport all the traitors" who do not support his father's reelection.

He has publicly declared his ambition to succeed his father as president and is an increasingly powerful figure in Uganda's political and security landscape. He has consistently signaled his political aspirations through an active social media presence, public statements, and rallies organized under the Muhoozi Kainerugaba movement. Indeed, it is only his father who has demonstrated any real ability to reel his son in and begin to hold him accountable, which he did in 2022, albeit only temporarily, when his son threatened to invade neighboring Kenya.

Electoral Violence as Institutional Strategy

Violence in Uganda's electoral process is not an unintended consequence but an institutional strategy. In the 2016 elections, the Citizen Election Observers Network in Uganda documented numerous cases of intimidation and violence between rival factions within the party. Other election observers and court filings have also documented incidents of violence, irregularities, and intimidation during the party primaries. Similarly, in the last presidential vote in 2021, Human Rights Watch reported that, "The weeks leading up to Uganda's recently concluded elections were characterized by widespread violence and human rights abuses" and that "the abuses included killings by security forces, arrests and beatings of opposition supporters and journalists, disruption of opposition rallies, and a shutdown of the internet." More recently, in July 2025, Tanga Odoi, the party's electoral commission chairperson, suspended campaigns in Isingiro and Sembabule districts, citing increased violence as one of the reasons.

The escalating pattern of political violence surrounding Uganda's 2026 elections, a replay of the 2021 vote, is already prompting grave warnings from international observers. The U.S.-based Holocaust Memorial Museum has issued an unprecedented warning about the possibility of "mass atrocities" around the election, noting that "there is strong reason to believe that the repression and violence that transpired during the 2021 campaign and election may recur in 2026 or be worse."

Weakened Monitoring and Accountability

The risks to safety and security in the lead-up to Uganda's elections are compounded by the systematic weakening of electoral oversight mechanisms going into this electoral period. The United States Agency for International Development, which has traditionally supported voter education and election monitoring programs in Uganda, ended its support to the country with its closure this spring. Compounding this withdrawal of funds is the Trump administration's decision to "avoid opining on the fairness or integrity of an electoral process, its legitimacy, or the democratic values of the country in question." In the 2021 elections, the U.S. Embassy in Uganda and Washington officials were among the loudest critics of Uganda's pre-electoral environment and became deeply involved to speed the release of opposition candidate Bobi Wine, who was detained in his home by security officials in the lead-up to elections most Western observers claimed were rigged by Museveni.

Similarly, the European Union, which has traditionally been the largest supporter of Ugandan governance reforms, chose not to send an election observation mission to Uganda's 2021 presidential elections, after complaints that advice from previous observers to make the polls fair went unheeded. While it is too early to know which countries or organizations might be present in Uganda to monitor the vote, the dangerous trajectory of next year's vote suggests that most Western monitors are likely to refrain from sending delegations. This alone could increase the likelihood that violence could ensue and that Museveni's path to reelection faces even fewer obstacles. Regrettably, this withdrawal of international support comes precisely when Uganda needs enhanced monitoring the most. The combination of increased repression and reduced oversight creates optimal conditions for electoral violence to escalate unchecked.

The Cost of Disengagement

Western nations find themselves at a critical juncture regarding Uganda, where decades of engagement and billions of dollars in aid are being undermined by strategic inattention precisely when it is most needed. The timing of this disengagement represents a potentially catastrophic failure of conflict prevention that could destabilize a strategically vital region. Ironically, this disengagement is playing into President Museveni's overriding ambition to secure another term in office for himself and potentially create the glide path for his son to formalize his ambition as heir apparent.

The United States has been Uganda's most significant development partner for decades, and in recent years, one of its most intrusive and critical. The United States provided more than $8.1 billion in aid to Uganda between 2001 and 2019. In 2017, the Ugandan government received 58 percent of its national budget from donor funding, falling to 44 percent by 2019, with the largest share of those funds coming in the form of security assistance from the United States. This is in part due to the critical role that President Museveni has cunningly carved out for his country, contributing to regional security. As far back as joint efforts with Washington to defeat the Lord's Resistance Army, to its more recent role in leading the African Union's counterterror deployment to Somalia, President Museveni has successfully aligned his government with many of Washington's regional security priorities as part of an overall effort to blunt criticism of his increasingly authoritarian domestic political approach.

This massive investment has made the United States a crucial stakeholder in Uganda's stability. The U.S. government has played a key role in supporting the professionalization of the military; providing anti-retroviral treatment for more than 990,000 HIV-positive Ugandans; and working to boost economic growth and agricultural productivity, improve educational and health outcomes, and support democratic governance through inclusive, accountable institutions-providing ample leverage to weigh in on matters as consequential as elections. At the same time, Washington's relations with Uganda have soured as Kampala has pursued policies that have directly contradicted some of Washington's stated policy priorities. These tensions became particularly acute during the Biden administration, when, coming on the heels of the 2021 elections over which the Department of State expressed it was "gravely concerned" by the election process, Museveni signed into law anti-gay legislation that made homosexuality a crime punishable by death. U.S. sanctions and visa restrictions followed and have marked a nadir in U.S.-Ugandan relations.

But President Trump's reelection has created substantially new opportunities to reset the relationship and created the impetus for President Museveni to dust off his playbook of finding ways to align his domestic policies with Washington's own priorities. That agenda appears to have been concretized in a recent August phone call between President Museveni and Secretary of State Marco Rubio, the outcome of which was an agreement for Uganda to begin to take in American deportees whose asylum claims were rejected-one of the Trump administration's highest domestic priorities. Rubio's readout from the call praised Uganda for its cooperation on migration and commercial ties and underscored Uganda's "valuable contributions" to regional stability, but made no mention of the perilous and corrosive pre-election political environment that could well undermine the vaunted stability Rubio praises.

Uganda has historically served U.S. strategic interests in East Africa. This partnership framework makes Uganda's democratic regression particularly consequential for U.S. interests. A violent electoral crisis or authoritarian consolidation would not only undermine billions of dollars in past investments but potentially also destabilize U.S. counterterrorism efforts across the region.

Conclusion

Uganda's closing political space, governance lapses, and overt authoritarianism are nothing new, but the 2026 pre-election environment demonstrates a new level of brazenness and risk. As threats to political opposition, free press, and civil society escalate, so too do the risks that elections, barely five months away, could be Uganda's most bloody to date. But with a new transactional deal in hand to host U.S. deportees, along with a substantially curtailed investment from EU members to engage the Museveni government around its governance failures, the prospects are grimmer than ever that international pressure and observation might somehow play a useful role in pressing President Museveni into relenting. Absent a more robust domestic civil society response in the lead-up to elections, expectations are high that President Museveni's ambitions for a seventh term in office will go largely unchecked or else be met with an overwhelmingly brutal response. Either way, Uganda's promised stability will likely emerge as deeply compromised.

Cameron Hudson is a senior associate (non-resident) with the Africa Program at the Center for Strategic and International Studies in Washington, D.C.

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