MOGADISHU, SOMALIA – Puntland and Jubaland walked out of Mogadishu’s election talks this week, and no committee has stepped in since to paper over the gap. Delegations from both states left the capital on Tuesday, concluding that Hassan Sheikh Mohamud’s government would not bend on the shape of the country’s electoral system. Their departure ends any pretense that the election talks were close to a breakthrough. It also leaves the international partners who convened the process searching for a fallback they have already tried, and failed with, twice before.
Officials from both administrations said the sessions made no real progress on the core dispute. Somalia must either move toward direct elections or keep the indirect, clan-brokered model that has let Villa Somalia handpick allies to run federal member states. Neither Puntland nor Jubaland got an answer it could carry home, so both delegations left rather than wait for one. The federal government has not issued a public response to the walkout, nor to the claim that its negotiators refused to compromise. That silence has become Mogadishu’s default reply whenever a regional government airs a grievance in public.
An Old Fight Breaks the Election Talks Again
The dispute behind this week’s walkout is not new; it has simply reached a harder edge. Puntland and Jubaland have pushed what they call the Transitional Direct Elections Model. It would let citizens vote directly while preserving the existing clan-based power-sharing formula through the transition. Hassan Sheikh Mohamud’s negotiators have treated that model as a nonstarter. They offer adjustments to the current indirect system instead, which leaves the final say over member state leadership in Mogadishu’s hands. Both states watched Villa Somalia engineer outcomes in the Southwest and lean hard on Galmudug’s leadership this year. An indirect model therefore reads to them as anything but a neutral compromise. It is the mechanism they blame for their own political troubles.
The technical distance between the two positions is smaller than the political distance. Both sides accept that a full one-person-one-vote election cannot be organised in every district before the term expires, and both accept that clan quotas will survive the transition in some form. What separates them is who certifies the result in a member state, and that question has never been about electoral engineering. It is about whether Villa Somalia can continue to decide who governs Kismayo and Garowe.
That history is why the delegations left rather than lingered at the table. The federal government undermined Jubaland’s own elections by following the same playbook it first tested in Puntland, pressuring local politics from outside while insisting in public that it only wanted a fair process. Officials in Garowe and Kismayo now read every federal position in the election talks through that lens. A negotiating partner with a documented record of tilting the field is not an easy one to trust with the next set of rules.
Timing sharpens the suspicion further. The president’s own mandate lapsed in May, and the one-year extension he took for himself was never agreed with the member states now being asked to accept his electoral model. A government negotiating the rules of a transition it has already extended unilaterally starts from a weak position, whatever the merits of its proposal.
A Council Nobody Agreed On, Revived a Third Time
With the Mogadishu track stalled, international partners are reportedly dusting off an idea they have already shelved twice. Sources familiar with the discussions say officials from the United States, Britain, Turkiye and the European Union are weighing a proposal for a temporary governing council. It would oversee national affairs during a transition, holding power until the country reaches a broader political settlement. The concept resurfaces every time the election talks hit a wall, and this marks the third attempt to revive it. Nothing about the underlying disagreements has actually been resolved; the idea is simply the only one still left on the table.
The council idea also runs into the same legitimacy problem it did in its earlier incarnations. Somebody would have to appoint its members, and every candidate for that role is a party to the dispute. Federal institutions would nominate figures the member states reject, the member states would nominate figures Mogadishu rejects, and international partners have neither the standing nor the appetite to impose a list of their own.
Partners are also said to be discussing a meeting of Somali leaders held entirely outside the country, an option floated once before and rejected by opposition figures who still believed domestic dialogue could succeed. That belief looks harder to sustain after this week’s walkout. Moving the venue outside Somalia would be a quiet admission that Mogadishu can no longer host election talks its own participants trust. That is a heavy concession for a government that has spent two years insisting it alone should set the terms of the country’s transition.
Precedent is not encouraging either. Somali political settlements negotiated abroad, from Djibouti to Nairobi, have generally produced documents that lasted only as long as the foreign hosts kept paying attention. Nobody in Garowe or Kismayo expects a hotel conference in a third country to bind a federal government that has ignored agreements signed at home.
Turkiye Extends Its Mandate as the Talks It Helped Convene Collapse
The walkout landed the same week Turkiye’s parliament approved a two-year extension of its military deployment in Somalia, pushing the mandate to July 2028. Lawmakers in Ankara framed the vote as a routine renewal of a partnership that trains Somali soldiers, patrols the country’s waters, and backs the fight against al-Shabaab. Turkiye has invested more than a billion dollars in Somalia. Its companies now manage Mogadishu’s airport and seaport, and they are exploring for oil off the coast. Ordinary Somalis, meanwhile, still cannot apply for a Turkish e-visa online; they must present themselves at a diplomatic mission in person instead.
That asymmetry sits awkwardly beside Ankara’s role as a broker of Somalia’s election talks. Turkish officials sat among the international partners facilitating this month’s Mogadishu sessions. Their intelligence service had convened an earlier round of election talks that Puntland and Jubaland boycotted outright, citing Ankara’s tilt toward Mogadishu. A mediator that just locked in two more years of bilateral military commitments to one side of a dispute is not the honest broker Puntland and Jubaland say they need. Their renewed absence from the table suggests they still see it that way.
The extension itself was never in doubt, and that is part of the point. Ankara’s difficulty is structural rather than personal. A state that trains one side’s army, runs its ports and drills in its waters cannot easily present itself as neutral when that side is the subject of the negotiation. Turkish diplomats have argued that their investment gives them leverage no other partner holds, which is true, and the same investment is precisely what makes two federal member states discount everything they say.
A Funding Cliff Arrives on the Same Calendar
The political deadlock is colliding with a security drawdown that was already scheduled before the delegations packed their bags. Washington has told the African Union it will not support any extension of the continental mission in Somalia that keeps United Nations logistics flowing through the UN Support Office after this year. That decision leaves the mission’s food, fuel and transport arrangements without a funding source once the office closes at the end of December. Gulf donors have not filled the gap. Sources briefed on the talks say Turkiye cannot fully replace what Washington and the African Union provide, even with its expanded bilateral footprint.
That timing raises the cost of a political vacuum most Somalis did not choose. A country facing a funding cliff needs a credible government, and the election talks were supposed to help produce one. Instead, the two federal member states most committed to a rules-based transition just left the room, while the mission meant to hold the security line behind that transition keeps running toward a fixed date donors show no sign of moving.
Somali officials have argued that partners are punishing the country for a dispute the partners themselves helped create, by treating Villa Somalia as the only interlocutor for years. The sequencing of the election talks matters for anyone trying to plan around them. Security funding decisions are being taken in New York and Addis Ababa on a calendar that does not wait for Somali consensus, and each month of deadlock removes options rather than preserving them.
Puntland Reads the Room Differently Than Mogadishu Does
Puntland’s calculation has stayed consistent through every round of this argument: walking away costs less than signing onto a process it does not trust. President Said Abdullahi Deni has said publicly that his administration will not accept a framework written to entrench federal control, and Jubaland’s Ahmed Madobe has taken a nearly identical line. Both governments continue to function while they wait, running their own security operations and their own budgets, a contrast their supporters draw deliberately against a capital that still cannot close out its own transition talks.
Whether that patience holds is the real question raised by this week’s collapse of the election talks. Somalia’s international partners now face three unattractive options. They can revive a governing council concept that has failed twice, relocate a fragile negotiation outside the country, or accept that the election talks will not deliver on the promised timeline. None of those options resolves the underlying argument over how much power Mogadishu gets to keep. Until it is settled, Puntland and Jubaland would rather negotiate from outside the room than sit inside one they believe is rigged against them.
Deni’s calculation also rests on a comparison he makes at every opportunity, and the election talks gave him fresh material for it. Puntland collects its own customs revenue, pays its own forces and held its own local elections, while the federal capital has spent the year negotiating about negotiations. There is a cost to that position, and Garowe and Kismayo know it. Staying outside the process means forfeiting influence over the details, and it hands Mogadishu the argument that the member states are the obstacle.
