https://www.aljazeera.com/news/2022/5/6/somalia-lawmakers-to-decide-president-on-may-15
Somalia’s government has stated that it will announce the country’s new president on May 15 as a part of the larger goal to put in place a new government by the May 17 deadline that was set by the International Monetary Fund which will retract its financial support as a penalty for not meeting the deadline. The budget provided by the International Monetary Fund is critical for Somalia as the country has been paying off billions of dollars of debt for years and reliant on outside help, including debt relief from 116 outside countries. The election process has been inhibited by inner disagreements among their parliament and the current president Mohamed Abdullahi Farmaajo whose attempt to extend his term as president by two years was blocked by parliament. Particularly, continued struggling between the prime minister, Mohamed Hussein Roble, and the president has made progress towards establishing government institutions and conducting elections painstakingly slow, especially when the Somali government is so shaky while also sustaining attacks by al-Shabab, a terrorist group linked to al-Qaeda.
The current Somali allied forces attempting to establish the fragile government are still fighting for control over the country with al-Shabab, with the government holding the capital of Mogadishu and main cities and the terrorist group maintaining pockets of territory in more barren rural areas of the Galmudug state in central Somalia and the Jubaland state in southern Somalia where the capital lies. And still, there is scarce unity even among the members and branches of government that make up the allied forces, leading to Somalia’s status as a “fragile state” and the rather impossible situation that is the Somali Civil War. It seems to me that whatever president is chosen in this new vote, it will be most beneficial for Somalia if they are compatible with the parliament since it is hard for a government with divided branches to take the necessary actions and make improvements. In this sense, it is good that the president will be chosen by the lower house of parliament despite the fact that such an indirect election as this is less democratic because the people will have less opportunities to have their voices heard by their leaders.
Somalia has an indirect representative election process for their president where a select group of clan elders determine the 275 members of the lower parliamentary house which votes for which candidate will become president. From a Comparative Government perspective, democracies and republics both have the downside that their principles can be cumbersome as it takes time to find a compromise if there is one to be made which means that the effects of government decisions are not immediate and in times of distress and strong need for government action, this will create numerous problems. Yet simultaneously, discontent among the people on account of government actions that they disapprove of leads to unrest and conflict. As such, Somalia is very much stuck between a rock and a hard place because it does not have the development necessary to withstand the consequences of the latter but cannot move forward the way it wants to with the former.