What to Know About the Coup in Guinea-Bissau

The opposition has accused the president of putting a general in charge of the government so that he could stay in power and lead by proxy.General Horta Inta-a during his swearing-in ceremony as the transitional leader of Guinea-Bissau.Credit...Patrick Meinhardt/Agence France-Presse — Getty ImagesNov. 27, 2025The military in Guinea-Bissau has installed a general as the country’s new transitional leader, a day after President Umaro Sissoco Embaló was deposed in a coup that the opposition claims was “fabricated.”The small West African nation held an election last week, and its electoral commission was expected to release final results on Thursday. Opposition leaders have said Mr. Embaló had lost the vote.The opposition insists that the president staged a coup to stay in power, installing allies from the military so that he could lead by proxy.“Umaro lost the elections, and instead of accepting the result, he fabricated a coup d’état,” Fernando Dias, the leading opposition candidate in the election, said in a video shared widely on social media.Gen. Horta Inta-a, a special adviser for defense and security and a close ally of Mr. Embaló who previously served as his chief of staff, was sworn in on Thursday at the army headquarters in the capital, Bissau, flanked by about a dozen military officers. He said the transition would last one year.“I have just been appointed by the high military command to assure the command of the country in order to restore constitutional order,” Gen. Inta-a said during a ceremony that was broadcast on state television.The whereabouts of Mr. Dias, who said an attempt to arrest him was made yesterday, were not immediately known. The Senegalese foreign ministry said in a statement on Thursday that Mr. Embaló had landed safely in Senegal after taking a chartered flight to the country. Domingos Simões Pereira, a key opposition figure who was barred from the ballot and had aligned himself with Mr. Dias, was arrested yesterday.Mr. Dias said once Mr. Embaló realized he had lost the election, “He couldn’t handle defeat, so he sent the presidential guard and the forces of the Ministry of the Interior to arrest me.”Guinea-Bissau, a tiny country between Senegal and Guinea, has a long history of coups. Since multiparty elections were introduced more than three decades ago, no president has ever been re-elected because of coups and political assassinations.José Mário Vaz, the only incumbent to have completed a five-year term and then sought re-election, was voted out of office in 2019 after Mr. Embaló won in a runoff.The nature of Wednesday’s takeover, even by the standards of a country that has experienced four coups, stands out in a year marked by contested elections across Africa.Both Mr. Embaló and Mr. Dias claimed to have won just a day after the vote. Those claims could not be independently verified. The electoral commission’s offices were stormed by armed men ahead of the release of the official tally.Edwin Melvin Snowe, a senator from Liberia and an election observer for the Economic Community of West African States, a regional body, said, “Dias had already hit the 50 percent mark” by the time that ECOWAS had received all of the tally sheets from various polls.Mr. Snowe said he was speaking for himself, not on behalf of the organization.The military said the takeover on Wednesday was necessary because there had been a plot involving politicians and drug barons, and an attempt to manipulate the vote. But independent election observers have said there was no evidence of rigging.“The election was very well managed,” said Ann Iyonu, the secretary general of West African Elders Forum. “There were no incidents of fraud. It was conducted properly. This whole coup was a shock.”Guinea-Bissau’s transition could end up taking much longer than the one year pledged by General Inta-a. A wave of coups has swept through West and Central Africa in recent years, and juntas in Mali, Niger and Burkina Faso have all clung to power, postponing elections in their countries for as much as five years.By installing the general, “it could be one way of trying to win concessions” before Mr. Embaló and his supporters hand over power, said Beverly Ochieng, a senior analyst at Control Risks.The African Union, another regional body, issued a joint statement with ECOWAS on Thursday urging a return to constitutional order in Guinea-Bissau and calling on the military to let the electoral process move forward as planned.Ricci Shryock contributed reporting.Saikou Jammeh is a reporter and researcher for The Times based in Dakar, Senegal.Ruth Maclean is the West Africa bureau chief for The Times, covering 25 countries including Nigeria, Congo, the countries in the Sahel region as well as Central Africa.A version of this article appears in print on , Section A, Page 7 of the New York edition with the headline: Military Leader Installed After Guinea-Bissau Coup. Order Reprints | Today’s Paper | SubscribeSKIP