With 180 seats in the National Assembly and 100 seats in the Senate, if every officially recognized political party in Cameroon focused on campaigning for just one of those seats, 90 parties are guaranteed to end up without a seat. That lopsided ratio of parties to attainable mandates in the House of Parliament echoes Nigerian Afrobeat legend Fela Kuti’s caustic 1986 verdict on African politics –what he called:-
demo-crazy: crazy demo, demonstration of craze
The country’s ballooning roster of micro-parties has since turned the ballot into precisely the spectacle Fela decried. In the ongoing race to the October 12, 2025, elections, we have seen candidates whose applications to run for the highest office in the country were denied for not including the required birth certificate, and some for not being registered voters.
Out of 82 applications received. 13 were retained. The 2018 presidential election runner-up, Maurice Kamto, is missing from the list of retained candidates. It had long been purported that he would be ineligible to run because of a clause in the electoral code that says only parties represented in parliament can present a candidate for the presidential elections. In 2020, his party boycotted the parliamentary and municipal elections to protest against the existing electoral code.
In a last-minute move, he resigned from his party (MRC) and was presented by MANIDEM as their candidate, only to end up caught in a situation where an estranged executive of MANIDEM resurfaced with his own candidacy. -triggering a clause in the electoral code which rejects applications of parties that present more than one candidate.
Here is a breakdown of the number of parties by region.