Somalia's Cracking Federation

Hassan Sheikh Mohamud's term ends on Friday. Farmajo has spent two years preparing for what comes next.

When Mohamed Abdullahi Farmajo, Somalia's eighth president, settled into Doha after losing power in 2022, few expected the silence of the political afterlife. Few got it. From Qatar he kept up a steady drumbeat of opposition. He accused Hassan Sheikh Mohamud of dismantling the National Consultative Council "for partisan ambitions." He denounced the proposed national dialogue as "exclusionary." He rejected the government's one-person-one-vote election plan as a rule change disguised as reform. By the time he returned to Mogadishu earlier this year, the opposition position was set. So was the calendar.

That calendar reaches its first hard mark on Friday, 15 May 2026, when Hassan Sheikh's four-year mandate constitutionally expires. There is no consensus on what follows. On 4 March parliament approved final amendments to the provisional constitution. The president signed the consolidated text four days later and declared it the "Official Constitution of the Federal Republic of Somalia." Parliament has also backed a one-year extension to his term. The opposition has rejected both moves. The Somali Future Council, the principal opposition alliance, has committed not to recognise Hassan Sheikh's authority after Friday and has floated a parallel election timeline of its own.

In a brief post on X this week, Farmajo joined the calendar to the substance. The 15th, he wrote, would be "the last legitimate day of outgoing president Hassan Sheikh's term." He demanded an "inclusive election model with all stakeholders" and the release of "illegally imprisoned civil society activists and journalists." None of the positions were new. The framing — "outgoing" — was. After two years describing the cliff in the abstract, Farmajo had affixed it to a date.

A federation that has stopped showing up The harder problem for Hassan Sheikh is not the opposition but the federation. The architecture Somalia has been laboriously assembling over two decades — a federal centre plus six member states — depends on member-state buy-in for legitimacy on every consequential question, elections included.

That buy-in has eroded sharply over the past quarter. In March, South West State authorities severed ties with Mogadishu, accusing the federal government of arming militias against state institutions. The dispute escalated until federal forces took the state capital, Baidoa. Coordination between federal and Puntland forces against Al-Shabaab and the Islamic State affiliate in the northeast has worsened. Jubaland's relationship with Mogadishu has been distrustful for years. Somaliland remains, as it has for three decades, outside the federal architecture entirely.

Hassan Sheikh has called a national summit on Saturday, 10 May, ostensibly to defuse the dispute. The attendance list will read as a forecast. If federal-state presidents and senior opposition figures stay home, the meeting becomes a formality, and the president walks into 15 May governing largely through the army and parliament. That has been done in Mogadishu before. It has not been done sustainably.

Farmajo's positioning Farmajo has not declared a 2026 candidacy. He is widely counted among its leading contenders. The case he has spent two years building — that the current administration is hollowing out the federal compact, undermining the consultative bodies that hold it together, and using constitutional revision to entrench a presidency it cannot legitimately renew — slots cleanly into the May 15 fight. His Doha years, where he retained an unusually high political profile and the quiet support of his Gulf hosts, gave him the runway to keep that case alive without the institutional friction of a Mogadishu address. Now that he is back, the opposition coalition has its most experienced political figure standing publicly inside its calendar.

What Friday means The constitutional question that arrives on Friday is not really about Hassan Sheikh, nor even about Farmajo. It is whether Somalia's federal experiment survives the next two weeks intact, or whether the country re-enters the period — last seen at the close of Farmajo's own term in 2021 — in which authority becomes a function of who other actors choose to recognise. International donors, the African Union mission's successor force, neighbouring states in the Horn, and Somalia's Gulf interlocutors will all make that choice in the days after the deadline. The vote that matters this month will not be cast in parliament.