Electoral calendar 2025-2026 as published by the CEP

The five-page step-by-step electoral calendar accompanying CEP Press Release No. 2 of 23 December 2025, published under the electoral decree of 1 December 2025. It sets out the operations leading to a first round on 30 August 2026 and a second round, with the territorial elections, on 6 December 2026, each line giving a start date, a duration in days and an end date. Communication, awareness-raising and civic education run from 17 November 2025 all the way to 20 January 2027, the longest single strand. The departmental vote tabulation bureaux are to be put in place from 5 December 2025 over 239 days to 31 July 2026, and the acquisition and distribution of sensitive and non-sensitive material from 22 December 2025 over 250 days to 28 August 2026, both ending within days of the poll.

Observer and journalist accreditation runs from 5 January to 28 February 2026, registration of parties, groupings and regroupings from 2 to 26 March 2026, voter registration from 1 April to 29 June 2026 over ninety days, and candidate registration from 13 April 2026. Read against what followed, the calendar is useful precisely because it was overtaken: voter and candidate registration were postponed in April 2026 when the CEP began harmonizing the decree with the National Pact, and registration in fact opened on 20 July 2026.