Zambians go to the polls on Thursday in a general election that will decide not only who occupies State House for the next five years but whether the sweeping constitutional changes of the past year translate into a genuinely more representative Parliament. President Hakainde Hichilema of the United Party for National Development is seeking a second term against thirteen rivals, chief among them Brian Mundubile, a former ally of the late President Edgar Lungu who has consolidated support from a fractured opposition. According to the Electoral Commission of Zambia, voting will run from six in the morning until six in the evening at polling stations across the country, with roughly 8.8 million citizens on the voters’ roll and slightly more women than men registered to cast ballots.
The contest is being read, both within Zambia and across the region, as a test of whether one of Southern Africa’s more established multiparty democracies can extend or renew its governing mandate without the disruption that has recently unseated long-serving incumbents elsewhere on the continent. Zambia has managed three peaceful transfers of power through the ballot box since the return of multiparty politics, a record that regional observers, including missions from the Southern African Development Community, will be watching closely as they assess the credibility of this vote.
Economic recovery sits at the centre of the campaign. Hichilema’s government has pointed to a debt restructuring settlement, the resumption of an International Monetary Fund programme and a fall in inflation to around 6.5 per cent by June as evidence that its stewardship of the economy is bearing fruit. Free basic education and an enlarged Constituency Development Fund, which channels public money directly into locally driven infrastructure projects, are cited by the ruling party as tangible dividends of its first term. Yet these gains sit uneasily alongside the daily arithmetic faced by ordinary households, where a security guard’s or market trader’s monthly wage of sixty to a hundred US dollars is stretched thin by the rising cost of mealie meal and other staples, compounded by a drought that has damaged harvests and forced power rationing tied to hydroelectric shortfalls. The tension between macroeconomic recovery on paper and lived economic hardship is likely to shape how undecided voters, particularly in urban centres such as Lusaka and the Copperbelt, ultimately mark their ballots.
This will also be the first election conducted under the Constitution of Zambia (Amendment) Act No. 13 of 2025, which Hichilema signed into law in December. The reform increases the number of constituency based seats in the National Assembly from 156 to 226, elected by first past the post, and introduces forty additional seats filled through proportional representation and reserved specifically for women, youth and persons with disabilities, twenty, fifteen and five seats respectively. Supporters, including Justice Minister Princess Kasune, have presented the change as a historic step toward an assembly that finally mirrors the country’s demographic make up. Critics, among them Transparency International Zambia, have countered that expanding Parliament by ninety seats mostly benefits incumbency and risks entrenching executive influence over a delimitation process that was not published for public scrutiny before the reform passed. Both readings will be tested once results are known, since the outcome will determine whether the reserved seats function as intended or whether the enlarged first past the post map favours whichever party already commands local structures.
Women’s representation remains a live issue independent of the new reserved seats. Women make up roughly half of Zambia’s population but have long held only a small share of parliamentary seats and senior political office, and this election features a single female presidential candidate alongside a handful of women contesting for constituency seats. Civil society groups working on gender inclusion in politics argue that structural barriers, including the financial cost of campaigning and persistent social scepticism toward women in leadership, continue to limit participation regardless of legal reform, and that sustained civic education will be needed before formal quotas translate into equal standing within party structures themselves.
Questions about judicial independence have also featured prominently in the run up to polling day. In 2024, Hichilema suspended three Constitutional Court judges after a ruling that favoured his rival, the late Edgar Lungu, and lawyers and civil society monitors have since raised concerns about a 2025 salary increase for judicial officers that bypassed the constitutionally mandated emoluments process, as well as the appointment of sixteen new judges in early 2026, several with links to the governing party’s strongholds. Rights organisations, including Amnesty International, have separately warned that public order and cybercrime legislation has at times been used to constrain opposition gatherings and criticise government critics, a pattern they argue could chill political expression during a closely contested race. The judiciary’s own leadership has sought to reassure the public that it will discharge its constitutional responsibilities independently and within the timelines the law requires, though critics maintain that genuine independence depends on structural and financial autonomy from the executive rather than reassurance alone.
Turnout among younger voters is expected to again prove decisive. More than four million of the roughly 8.8 million registered voters are between eighteen and thirty five, according to figures compiled by the International Foundation for Electoral Systems, and it was precisely this cohort that helped carry Hichilema to a landslide victory in 2021. Whether that same energy now favours the incumbent, migrates toward Mundubile’s coalition, or fragments across the wider field of contenders will be one of the more consequential undercurrents of the count, particularly in the country’s more densely populated urban constituencies.
To win outright, a presidential candidate must secure more than half of the valid votes cast, failing which the two leading candidates proceed to a runoff. With fourteen names on the ballot, even modest shifts in support across Zambia’s ten provinces could tip the contest either way. The Electoral Commission has indicated that results are expected to be finalised by 17 August, four days after polling, once returns from all 226 constituencies and 13,529 polling stations have been received and verified. Whatever the outcome, the scale of the logistical undertaking, and the extent to which the newly enlarged Parliament comes to reflect the country it represents, will shape how Zambia’s democratic institutions are judged well beyond this single election cycle.
