MOGADISHU, SOMALIA – The Puntland seats in the 2027 federal parliament can be filled from ballots cast in other states under the single national constituency that electoral commission chairman Abdikarim Ahmed Hassan described on Saturday 17 October, and the federal record shows the arrangement being assembled for more than a year before he said so. His commission has registered voters since 2025 in Las Anod, capital of the North East State that Villa Somalia built on land Puntland claims, and in May he promised one-person, one-vote elections in Somaliland and Puntland in the same breath. Somaliland’s seats were filled in Mogadishu in 2016 and again in 2021, under a practice that draft election laws in 2020 extended to any region closed to voting for political reasons.
Somaliland’s Seats as the Working Model
On 10 December 2016 nine candidates were elected at a polling centre in Mogadishu to House of the People seats assigned to Somaliland and the northern regions, on the second day of voting in the capital. One women’s seat went to Amina Omar Jamma with all 51 votes cast by the electoral college delegates, and the spokesman of the federal indirect election team, Mohamed Keynan, said what made the vote special was that it was happening in Mogadishu. The 2021 cycle repeated it, with 46 delegates electing six Somaliland senators in the capital on 29 September 2021 and four House seats for the northern regions voted on 19 December at the General Kaahiye police headquarters in Mogadishu, while the government in Hargeisa took part in none of it.
Two draft election laws sent to parliament’s leadership on 7 June 2020 wrote the practice down. Article 4 provided that the seats of the northern regions would be elected in Mogadishu, with at least 81 registered voters for each seat. Article 5 then added that any seat which could not be contested in its assigned region for security and political reasons would be voted in Mogadishu instead. That clause named no region, and it reaches the Puntland seats as readily as Somaliland’s, covering a territory whose government declines to take part as fully as one where al-Shabaab holds the roads.
Puntland, by contrast, filled its own federal places at home in the same 2021 cycle. On 11 August 2021 the Puntland assembly elected the state’s eleven senators in the 54-member upper house, in a vote announced in Garowe by the Speaker of the Puntland House of Representatives, Abdirashid Yusuf Jibril. Consequently, the Puntland seats in the present parliament were filled by the state’s own institutions and through its own process. The change since has come from Mogadishu’s side of the table, through the constitutional amendments of March 2024 and the electoral law passed in November that year, both of which Puntland rejected as decisions the federal parliament had no authority to take alone.
A Pledge to Vote in Somaliland and Puntland
Abdikarim Ahmed Hassan placed the two territories in one sentence in May. “We will hold a one-person, one-vote election in Somaliland and Puntland,” he said in remarks published on 11 May, the day after his commission ran the South West vote, citing that election, held in a state al-Shabaab had affected, as the reason the commission could extend direct voting across the country. Puntland’s information minister rejected the plan the same day, saying that no electoral commission had the agreement of all Somalis and that Puntland holds its elections through its own commission, formed under its own constitution. Somaliland runs its own elections under its own laws, and Puntland had already stopped recognising the federal institutions after the March 2024 amendments, so the pledge described elections for the Puntland seats and Somaliland’s in two places whose governments would refuse them.
President Said Abdullahi Deni answered the federal programme on its own terms on 13 July. “There is little value in announcing one-person, one-vote elections when everyone already knows who will win,” he said in Garowe, adding that Puntland accepts direct elections in principle and wants an independent commission, an impartial judiciary and a level field for every party before it joins one. On 8 September he cancelled Puntland’s agreements with the federal government and said the state would run its own affairs until Somali leaders reached a settlement all sides could accept. He also dismissed the Puntland figures holding federal posts as a form of representation, saying that “the Puntland people in Mogadishu are simply employees who came for work.”
Under the single constituency, parties draw up national lists in Mogadishu and must meet the 4.5 clan formula on them, so the Puntland seats can go to candidates of the right lineage chosen by parties in the capital and elected on ballots counted elsewhere. The government in Garowe has no part in choosing any of them. Puntland then wrote to the Security Council that it would act independently until a government formed by consensus took office. The commission’s February registration report named no district under Puntland’s administration, and the Sool districts it did name sit under the North East State in Las Anod.
Las Anod and the North East Route
The federal government recognised the SSC-Khaatumo administration in Las Anod as an interim authority on 19 October 2023. Two years later, with the Puntland seats in the sitting parliament still those Garowe had filled, Interior Minister Ali Yusuf Hosh spent 53 days in the town as it was rebuilt as the North East State, with a constitution ratified on 30 July 2025, a parliament seated on 17 August and Abdikadir Ahmed Aw-Ali “Firdhiye” elected president on 30 August. The new state claims Sool, Sanaag and Cayn, President Hassan Sheikh Mohamud called its formation “a great day for the Somali people”, and Puntland objected that parts of Sanaag remain under its own administration.
The vice president elected the same day was Abdirashid Yusuf Jibril, Speaker of the Puntland House from November 2019 to January 2024, who announced the 2021 vote in which the Puntland assembly filled the Puntland seats in the Senate. In July 2025 he declared that “my people have chosen SSC-Khaatumo, and I stand with their decision.” Puntland’s attorney general then sought to prosecute him under the penal code’s state security articles for organising an armed force, and the Puntland House expelled him on 15 July by 38 votes to one. In October he and President Firdhiye split over five North East seats vacated by Sanaag members who had defected to Somaliland; Abdirashid Yusuf Jibril claimed the right to name their replacements, and on Sunday 18 October the candidates on the president’s list were sworn in after a brawl in the Las Anod chamber that ended with his faction removed.
In September 2025 Puntland forces were reported to have moved to Boocame and Falariyaale in Sool to stop the registration the federal government and the Las Anod administration had begun there, since Puntland counts those Dhulbahante areas as its own. Vice President Ilyas Osman Lugatoor, who comes from the area, had visited shortly before to lay foundation stones for Puntland development projects. By 15 December the commission was registering voters in Las Anod. On 19 February 2026 the chairman reported registration complete in Las Anod and listed Buuhoodle, Taleex and Xudun as districts still to open, and the commission’s 3 May timetable set North East local council elections for 30 July. Under the single constituency, a ballot cast in Las Anod counts toward every seat in the House, the Puntland seats included.
The Puntland Seats Without a Vote in Garowe
Abdikarim Ahmed Hassan’s 17 October formula completed the arrangement: votes are pooled nationally, each party takes seats in proportion to its share, and a seat elected in Karaan, Galkayo or Baidoa can stand for areas that do not vote. Prime Minister Hamza Abdi Barre had described the same mechanism on 27 September for five towns in the Juba valley. The commission’s own account of what has been achieved lists more than 660,000 voters at more than 870 centres in Banadir, South West, Galmudug and Hirshabelle, with more than 30 political associations competing and registration due to reopen from 1 to 22 November. The North East is not among those four administrations, although the May timetable had scheduled its local councils alongside those of Gedo, the one Jubaland region the commission put on its calendar.
Meanwhile, the federal government’s investment in Las Anod has moved beyond ballots. On the night of 26 September it paid more than 2,500 North East soldiers their first federal salaries, and some of the men were recruited in Sanaag, a region Puntland and Somaliland both claim. Accordingly, the administration through which the commission reaches the Puntland seats now holds a federal payroll as well as federal voter rolls, and its vice president sat in the Puntland House until his expulsion in July 2025.
Somaliland’s government has watched its seats filled in Mogadishu at two federal elections in a row and has answered with a recognition campaign that brought Israel’s recognition in December 2025. Puntland’s leadership has taken the opposite course, insisting it remains part of Somalia while refusing a process it says was rewritten without the member states. Under the 2027 formula, the Puntland seats can be filled whichever course Garowe takes. Abdirashid Yusuf Jibril announced the vote that sent eleven Puntland senators from Garowe to Mogadishu in August 2021; he is now vice president of the administration where the commission registers voters for 2027, in districts Puntland still counts as its own.
