On January 15, 2026, Uganda will head to the polls in a contest that falls a few weeks shy of the 30th anniversary of the country’s first universal suffrage election under the National Resistance Movement (NRM).
While the 2026 vote will happen within a multiparty framework, its makeup still owes much to the seeds sown during the May 9, 1996, ‘no-party’ presidential election and the June 27 parliamentary ballot that followed. That election was more than a transition from guerrilla-military to half-civilian mandate; it was the primary laboratory where the NRM developed the tactical and administrative mechanisms that define the Ugandan State today, and the logic of the electoral repression of the Opposition.