The adjustment to article 120 on the Designation of the Candidate for President and Vice-President of the Republic was approved at the VIII extraordinary congress of the Popular Movement for the Liberation of Angola (MPLA), which began on Monday and ended this Tuesday, in Luanda.
In the previous wording, article 120 established that the president of the party would be the candidate for president of the Republic, with the candidate for vice president being the second candidate on the list for the national circle.
With the amendment approved this Tuesday, the party president will only be a candidate for President of the Republic if this is the decision of the Central Committee, a change that has led analysts to point out the return of the issue of bicephaly, which the current president of the party and head of state, João Lourenço, rejected it in 2018 (when he was elected president of the Republic and his predecessor was president of the party), due to the interference it generated in his management of the country.
Speaking to the press, Celso Malavoloneke, member of the secretariat and communication committee of the MPLA's VIII extraordinary congress, said that the difference between the new formulation of article 120 and the previous one, which "already existed before, is that the candidate for President of the Republic by the MPLA or the head of the list will be nominated or elected by the Central Committee at the proposal of the Political Bureau".
"It is important to say that bicephaly in itself is neither good nor bad, it is something that exists and that the parties, the MPLA and others, may or may not resort to it depending on their strategy, their reading of the data in, of the signs of the times. It is important that there is not this prejudice that is going on on social media and also in the traditional press that bicephaly is something necessarily bad", he declared.
Asked whether, from now on, the MPLA will be able to have a candidate for President of the Republic who is not the party leader, Celso Malavoloneke replied that it is too early for such readings, highlighting that "everything is on the table".
The current President of the Republic, João Lourenço, cannot run for a new term in the 2027 elections.
"What the MPLA wanted to safeguard is that, if this happens, the MPLA has statutory space within it so that it can move forward along this path", he said.
The secretary for International Relations of the MPLA Political Bureau, Manuel Augusto, read the General Resolution, at the closing ceremony of the congress, in which it is stated that the adjustments made to the statutes aimed to conform the party structure with the new administrative political division, to ensure functional harmony in the context of the new territorial districts, and provide better clarification of the powers and mandates of intermediate bodies.
Manuel Augusto said that the adjustments to the MPLA statutes also aimed to restore important provisions relating to the powers of the party's national bodies and organizations.
"[Were introduced] improvements in form, in order to harmonize the different provisions, aiming at the adequacy and systematic balance of the statutes, ensuring that the statutory provisions do not constitute a conditioning element of the MPLA's electoral political strategy for the challenges that the future holds to our party", he listed.
