Democracy in Africa: the case of Portuguese-speaking African countries

Abstract

The year 2022 marks about 32 years of democratic opening in Portuguese-speaking African Countries (PALOP) after the one-party regime. The joint approach of the PALOP, which includes Angola, Cape Verde, Guinea-Bissau, Mozambique and São Tomé and Príncipe, is due to their cultural and historical characteristics and common colonial policy, they have Portuguese as their official language, as well as share the same pretexts to enter democratic regimes. The transformational process that Africa has gone through, and the PALOP in particular, can be understood in its historical, political, economic, cultural and social dimensions.. EExternal influences and elements rooted in the PALOP culture explain its current context and determine future prospects. The objective of this article is to describe the process of democratization in Portuguese-speaking African Countries (PALOP), seeking to understand its specificities, namely the centralization of power, patrimonialism and clientelism, in order to show the remnants of recent colonial culture, of the one-party regime – via mechanisms/instruments that make it impossible to achieve full democracy, substantially weakening the exercise of democracy. The method of bibliographic research is adopted, showing how democracy in the PALOP is related to its colonial past, the one-party regime, following the same operating logic. PALOPs need to free themselves from the shackles of their colonial past and one-party culture in order to advance a pluralist system through the active participation of all citizens and achieve full democracy.