Somalia’s broken rulebook

Since the establishment of Somalia’s “Third Republic,” political legitimacy has rested less on coercive power than on a shared acceptance of the rules that define lawful authority. This common normative ground has served as the glue binding Somalia’s political elite together. When that consensus is challenged, armed violence is never far out of reach. The armed clashes in Mogadishu on the night of 3 June acutely illustrate this dynamic. For twenty hours, federal forces loyal to President Hassan Sheikh Mohamud encircled and shelled the residences of former president Sharif Sheikh Ahmed and former prime minister Hassan Ali Khaire, plunging the capital into fighting across dense residential districts.

Defence Minister Ahmed Moallim Fiqi, who has increasingly adopted hostile rhetoric against the opposition, likening them to Sudan’s paramilitary Rapid Support Forces, who stand accused of committing genocidal violence in parts of Sudan, described the operation as the dismantling of an “armed coup attempt”. There is no doubt that the Defence Minister’s remarks were deeply reckless. But beyond that, they revealed the doctrine of the current federal government: a tendency to treat the opposition’s concerns not as issues deserving serious engagement, but as threats to the government’s preferred modus operandi in conducting contested constitutional and electoral amendments.

Khaire, in his own statement, described a “sustained and indiscriminate military assault” that began, according to reporting from the ground, while a Hawiye elders mediation initiated by Hassan Sheikh himself was still under way inside the house. The African Union and United Nations called for restraint. The United States embassy called the violence “reckless”.

The crisis, though long anticipated because of the growing failure to reach a political settlement between the opposition and the federal government, is the clearest indication yet of the constitutional crisis facing Somalia’s “Third Republic.” The post-2012 federal settlement worked, however imperfectly, because all sides accepted a shared rulebook even when they fought over it is application. The political and constitutional contract was based on a consensus model. That rulebook made successive transitions possible. What 3 June reveals is that the rulebook itself is now contested, and the institutions of the federal state have begun to operate without the consensus on which they were designed to rest.

The clearest articulation of this thesis came from the opposition. At a press conference held with Khaire on the evening of 4 June, Abdirahman Abdishakur, a key opposition figure, drew the relevant comparison. In 2021, when then-president Mohamed Abdullahi Farmaajo obtained a similar parliamentary extension, the standoff at least unfolded within an agreed political framework: the 17 September 2020 agreement, whose implementation formed the contested terrain. The dispute then was over electoral mechanics, not over the existence of the constitution itself.

Today, by contrast, neither the constitution nor the electoral model commands consensus. The constitutional amendments, analyzed in this article in March, were finalised over the objections of key federal member states, leaving the legal foundation of the process itself contested. Several rounds of talks were held in an attempt to reach consensus on the amendments, but the parties entered those discussions from fundamentally different starting points. That divergence made a negotiated settlement difficult from the outset. The opposition’s position remains categorical -- it does not accept constitutional changes made unilaterally by the government. It is stance is that the provisional constitution remains the rule of the land, and that any attempt to replace or amend it without broad political agreement is “null and void.”

American and British efforts to broker a transitional roadmap at Halane in mid-May collapsed within days. The opposition declared that the president has no mandate, effectively describing him as a “former president.” In defiance of the opposition bloc, President Mahmoud declared that his term will end next year and vowed that the constitutional changes made by his administration would not be reversed.

The 2017 and 2022 transition of power illuminates the dilemma Somalia faces today. Although the circumstances differ, the central political actors remain the same. In 2017, Hassan Sheikh accepted defeat to Farmaajo and transferred power peacefully. That outcome was possible because the electoral roadmap and the constitutional framework governing the contest rested on a sufficient degree of political consensus. In 2022, his return to office was also made possible by consensus politics -- the electoral model and term-extension project pursued by the incumbent administration were rejected by an opposition bloc that Hassan Sheikh himself helped lead, forcing a compromise that ultimately enabled his re-election. In doing so, he became the first Somalia’s president to be elected twice.

The question, then, is not whether Somalia has previously managed contested transitions, but what has changed in the political calculus of the same actor by 2026. Why is the acceptance of constitutional constraint that made earlier outcomes possible no longer evident? The answer lies in the erosion of the very consensus-building processes that produced both the 2017 transfer of power and the 2022 electoral settlement.

The position of the Federal Member States has become a clear sign of the growing erosion of consensus-building politics. Puntland and Jubbaland, both major stakeholders, cut ties with the Federal Government precisely because it pursued constitutional changes without broad political buy-in. Both states have condemned the attacks on former officials. Puntland’s cabinet, convening under Acting President Ilyas Osman Lugatoor, condemned the attacks and held Hassan Sheikh personally responsible, while renewing the Somali Future Council’s call for a national consultative conference. Jubbaland has long taken a similar position.

The federal government’s argument deserves a fair hearing. Mogadishu’s politics is structured around armed retinues, and these networks surround the presidency no less than the opposition. The claim that a sovereign state cannot indefinitely tolerate parallel armed forces in it is capital, especially forces capable of challenging the state, has a real institutional logic. What weakens that claim is not it is premise, but it is execution.

The response on 3 June was conducted as a military operation rather than a policing action. Moreover, the authority invoking the state’s monopoly on legitimate force is itself operating without an electoral mandate recognised by the federal member states. This creates a contradiction. The federal government appeared willing to accommodate non-state armed actors exercising significant power in the capital for as long as they remained politically manageable. It is objection emerged only when those actors began to question the legitimacy of the very institutions claiming constitutional authority to enforce state power. In that sense, the issue was not simply the existence of armed actors outside the state, but their challenge to the political legitimacy of president Hassan Sheikh.

A further dimension concerns the international actors whose support helped make Somalia’s current security architecture possible. The artillery deployed in Howl-Wadag is linked to specialised units trained, equipped, and supported by Türkiye, the United States, the European Union, and the African Union mission. This raises a question: can a counterinsurgency apparatus built with external assistance truly be treated as institutionally separate from domestic political contestation when it is deployed in a context involving perceived opposition figures?

Within security circles, there are legitimate concerns about the legality and political implications of using institutions developed with donor support for purposes that may be seen as partisan or coercive. The danger is legal and reputational. It also risks eroding international confidence in critical security institutions whose legitimacy depends on being perceived as national, professional, and politically neutral.

The more consequential cost, however, may lie beyond Mogadishu. In Moqokori, Adan Yabal, and along the Shabelle corridor, al-Shabaab has spent the past year reconstituting the territorial depth that the 2022 offensive had briefly stripped away. Any diversion of elite security units from the counterinsurgency front toward internal political disputes therefore carries a strategic price -- it weakens the very architecture that international partners helped construct, while creating space for al-Shabaab to recover.

The unprecedented crisis in which the “Third Republic” now finds itself reveals that the stakes are both higher and more dangerous than the usual dispute among political class. At risk is not simply a contest between a sitting president and presidential hopefuls, nor merely a disagreement between Villa Somalia, Kismayo, and Garowe. What is at stake is whether the institutional framework built over decades to put the country back on it is feet can withstand a moment in which it is principal actors no longer share a common understanding of the rules that govern it.

The successive transfers of power demonstrated that Somalia’s political rulebook could hold under pressure. The events of March, May, and June 2026 indicate that this consensus has now fractured. The central question is whether a new shared rulebook can be negotiated before the damage becomes irreversible, or whether the republic will continue operating under parallel constitutions, leaving the catastrophic consequences of this constitutional crisis dangerously uncharted.