Alassane Ouattara, President of Côte d’Ivoire, must address the Nation before Parliament meeting in Congress, this June 18, 2024 in Abidjan. While certain groups are actively preparing for the 2025 presidential election, this speech is closely monitored by the entire political class.
In Côte d’Ivoire, the Head of State is giving a speech this Tuesday to Parliament meeting in Congress, a solemn annual exercise where Alassane Ouattara takes stock of the state of the Nation. This speech aims to take stock of the government’s achievements and announce future prospects. In 2022, the president revealed the name of his vice-president.
This year, nothing is filtered on the content of his declaration, but speculation is rife, because the political class already has its head turned towards the presidential election of October 2025. The main question is to know whether the head of state will announce his candidacy for 2025.
Will Alassane Ouattara announce, as in 2020, whether he is a candidate or not? If he is not, will he offer other options? Three weeks ago, the board of the Rally of Houphouëtists for Democracy and Peace (RHDP), Alassane Ouattara’s political party, designated him as ‘its natural candidate’ to pursue its projects. Its activists are therefore waiting for a response.
In the opposition, new gestures of appeasement are expected to allow former president Laurent Gbagbo, former minister Charles Blé Goudé or even former Prime Minister Guillaume Soro to participate in the presidential election. Jean-Gervais Tchéïdé, the deputy spokesperson for the African People’s Party – Côte d’Ivoire (PPA-CI, Laurent Gbagbo’s party), emphasizes that ‘what can move Côte d’Ivoire forward is to create the conditions for elections to be inclusive and transparent.’
The political scientist Geoffroy-Julien Kouao recalls that ‘the head of state has the initiative of the law and can request a revision of the Constitution’, which leaves all hypotheses open. This jurist summarizes the situation by saying that Alassane Ouattara is alone in defining the content of his speech.
