MOGADISHU, SOMALIA – The United States, Britain, Turkiye and the European Union, the four partners known as the Quartet, have agreed to facilitate the election talks President Hassan Sheikh Mohamud called for 14 to 18 November in Mogadishu, and the countries with troops in Somalia have been asked to guarantee the security of President Said Abdullahi Deni of Puntland and President Ahmed Madobe of Jubaland. The arrangement, reported on Tuesday 10 November, turns a forum Villa Somalia announced on its own terms on 26 October into a negotiation run by the Quartet, five days after the Supreme Court ruled that the federal mandates had expired and gave the parties until 5 December to agree an electoral framework.
What the Quartet Has Agreed to Run
The agenda the four partners accepted includes meetings between the political leaders, a declaration of the basic principles of an agreement and consultations between technical committees, with the Quartet mediating each stage of the process. Most accounts give the dates as 14 to 18 November, as the presidency’s invitation did, while one report puts the opening a day later on the 15th. The stated aim is agreement on the electoral process and a joint mechanism to manage the vote, which is the question the federal government has so far settled alone, through its own commission and on its own timetable.
On 26 October the presidency invited four groups to the forum: the Nabad iyo Nolol party, the Somali Future Council, the National Unity Forum and the civil society umbrella. Eleven days earlier the electoral commission had set elections for both houses of parliament on 15 April 2027 and a presidential vote on 15 May 2027, under the one-person, one-vote model Villa Somalia favours and the opposition rejects. President Hassan Sheikh Mohamud told the country in a national address that his government was ready to sit down with anyone who held a different view, and the invitation made no provision for the Quartet or any other foreign mediator.
Three days later Abdulkadir Cosoble Ali, a Future Council member of parliament, refused to attend unless international mediators took part, arguing that the federal leadership uses every internal forum to harden its electoral position, and asked Uganda, Kenya, Djibouti and Burundi to take responsibility for political guarantees. The Council had already asked the Security Council in September for an international mediation mechanism to replace the political mission that left Somalia on 31 October with the constitution and the election in dispute. Accordingly, the Quartet’s agreement meets the first of Cosoble’s two demands in full, and the request to the troop contributors goes some way toward the second.
Guards for Two Presidents in Their Own Capital
President Said Abdullahi Deni and President Ahmed Madobe have kept away from Mogadishu talks before over this question. In early September an effort by international partners to bring both leaders to the capital stalled over the role of the international community, because Puntland and Jubaland refused an arrangement in which foreign partners acted only as facilitators of dialogue and wanted them to stand as guarantors of any settlement, with a defined mechanism to oversee its implementation. The Quartet’s stated role in November is to facilitate and mediate, and the guarantee now on offer is physical protection from foreign troops in the federal capital, which answers the demand Puntland and Jubaland made in September only in part.
Chief Justice Bashe Yusuf Ahmed, whose removal the Supreme Court has declared void, said on Sunday 8 November that he does not feel safe in Mogadishu and asked for the soldiers posted around the court, up to 300 of them by his account, to be withdrawn. “Today, as Chief Justice of the Supreme Court, I do not feel safe in my country’s capital,” he said, and he asked how other political leaders could feel safe there if the head of the judiciary could not. “I am not defending an office; I am defending the law,” he added.
The next day the Future Council, led by former President Sheikh Sharif Sheikh Ahmed, accused the president of using the security forces to take control of the Supreme Court and of intimidating Bashe Yusuf Ahmed and the judges who ruled on the mandates. “The Somali Future Council strongly condemns the assault and coup against the Federal Supreme Court,” its statement said. Meanwhile, the troops being asked to protect two federal member state presidents at the Quartet’s talks belong to a mission that is shrinking, since Uganda began withdrawing its bilateral contingent at the end of October.
The Court’s Clock Runs Under the Quartet
The ruling of 5 November, case MS/DST/1/2026, held that the mandates of the president, the parliament and the federal government had expired, that the amendments extending terms from four years to five could not apply to sitting officeholders, and that the government’s powers were limited to caretaking. It ordered the parties to agree an electoral framework within thirty days, by 5 December, and to hold elections within ninety, by 3 February 2027, which placed the end of President Hassan Sheikh Mohamud’s term in May.
The government holds that the March amendments keep the president and parliament in office until 2027, and the Attorney General’s office declared the ruling without legal effect on 6 November. The president had dismissed Bashe Yusuf Ahmed on 4 November and swore in Ibrahim Idle Suleiman, the legal affairs secretary of his own Justice and Solidarity Party, as chief justice on 7 November. President Said Abdullahi Deni had already told him to resign before the Future Council answered his invitation. The Council welcomed the ruling as a chance to end the deadlock through an inclusive agreement and said President Hassan Sheikh Mohamud would bear responsibility for any instability that followed, while the Uganda Law Society, from the country whose troops are leaving, urged him to respect the court’s rulings.
The Quartet therefore opens its talks with the host and his guests disagreeing over whether the host still holds office, and with the court’s 5 December deadline falling seventeen days after the forum closes. Its four members have agreed to mediate between a government that rejects the ruling and an opposition that treats it as the starting point, in a capital where the chief justice says he is unsafe and where two federal member state presidents have been offered foreign protection to take their seats. No statement from Villa Somalia on the Quartet’s role appears in the reports of the arrangement.
