The Central African Republic will hold general elections, including the presidential ballot, at the end of December 2025, the electoral authority said on Thursday.

President Faustin Archange Touadera had in late July announced he would seek a third term in the Russia-friendly country, riven by decades of instability and still locked in fighting with various armed groups.
According to the published schedule, the CAR’s citizens will go to the polls on December 28 for the first round of the presidential and parliamentary elections.
Voters will also cast ballots in the regional and municipal elections, long delayed by issues with the electoral roll and funding.
By the authority’s count, some 2.3 million voters are expected at the ballot box, of which 749,000 will have been freshly enrolled.
First elected president in 2016, Touadera regained the post in 2020 in a ballot marred by unrest and accusations of fraud.
His critics accuse him of wanting to become president for life following the adoption of a replacement constitution in 2023 allowing him to seek a third term.
Touadera’s first election came in the middle of a bloody civil war that gripped the country between 2013 and 2018, one in a series of crises to hit the impoverished country since independence from France in 1960.
In recent years the security situation has improved, due to a United Nations peacekeeping mission, the presence of Rwandan troops and the intervention of Russia’s notorious Wagner paramilitary group.
Anti-government fighters are still active on the country’s main highways, as well as in the east near the border with war-torn Sudan and South Sudan.
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© Agence France-Presse