The Democratic Republic of the Congo goes to the polls on Sunday with 21 candidates running to replace Joseph Kabila, who has been president since 2001. The photographer John Wessels has been watching the campaign transform the streets of the capital, Kinshasa. General elections are scheduled to be held in the Democratic Republic of the Congo on 23 December 2018, to determine a successor to incumbent President Joseph Kabila. They were originally scheduled for 27 November 2016, but were delayed with a broken promise to hold them by the end of 2017. According to the constitution, the second and final term of President Kabila expired on 20 December 2016. Incumbent President Kabila is constitutionally unable to participate and a cabinet minister has said he will not run. He and his party, the People’s Party for Reconstruction and Democracy, support the candidacy of Emmanuel Ramazani Shadary, the former Interior Minister. In opposition to Shadary's candidacy, seven opposition leaders, including Jean-Pierre Bemba and Moïse Katumbi, nominated Martin Fayulu as their candidate for president.
On 29 September 2016, the Independent National Electoral Commission (CENI) announced that the elections would not be held until early 2018. According to CENI's vice president, the commission "hasn’t called elections in 2016 because the number of voters isn’t known." The announcement came ten days after deadly protests against Kabila in Kinshasa saw 17 people killed. The opposition alleged that Kabila intentionally delayed the elections to remain in power. An agreement reached with the opposition in December 2016 allowed Kabila to stay in office with a requirement to hold elections by the end of 2017. However, on 7 July 2017, CENI President Corneille Nangaa said it would not be possible to organize presidential elections by the end of the year. Opposition leader Felix Tshisekedi condemned the announcement on Twitter, saying Nangaa had "declared war on the Congolese people."
In November 2017 CENI announced that elections will be held in December 2018, after previously claiming earlier that month that elections could not be held until April 2019 due to the difficulties of registering voters in a country with underdeveloped infrastructure. Prime Minister Bruno Tshibala confirmed in March 2018 that the election will occur in December. According to the UN a total of 47 people had been killed at protests against President Kabila during this period, which occurred throughout 2017 and into 2018. According to Human Rights Watch, government security forces used live rounds to disperse crowds of opposition supporters throughout August 2018, stating that the total death toll by then since 2015 was 300 people. HRW also documented attempts by the Congolese government to persecute members of the opposition, such as banning Moïse Katumbi from entering the country and forcefully dispersing a rally in support of Jean Pierre Bemba.
According to Article 71 of the DRC Constitution, the President of the Democratic Republic of the Congo is elected by plurality vote in one round. Article 72 specifies that the requirements to stand as a candidate for the presidency are being a Congolese citizen and at least thirty years old. Article 101 of the Constitution provides the basis for electing a National Assembly. The 500 members of the National Assembly are elected by two methods; 60 are elected from single-member constituencies using first-past-the-post voting, and 440 are elected from 109 multi-member constituencies by open list proportional representation, with seats allocated using the largest remainder method to all lists gathering more than 1 % of the valid votes. For the first time, electronic voting machines will be used in a Congolese election. This has raised concerns about vote-rigging, particularly after a warehouse fire in Kinshasa destroyed 8,000 voting machines, which represent more than two thirds of the voting machines that had been planned to be used in the city.
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