The multiparty republic, 1993 to today

The return to democracy was negotiated, not overthrown. A new constitution, the founding document of the Third Republic, was adopted in 1993, and James Mancham came home from fifteen years of exile to take part in writing it. He then ran against René in the first free election and lost, taking about 37 percent of the vote. René had made the change on his own terms and won the contest it produced, and he would win again in 1998 and 2001.

What followed was a long, managed loosening. In 2004 René stepped down and handed the presidency to his vice-president, James Michel, who was then elected in his own right and governed until 2016, when he in turn resigned in favour of his vice-president, Danny Faure. For four decades, through every constitutional form, the same political movement had held the presidency.

That ended in 2020. Wavel Ramkalawan, an Anglican priest who had been the face of the opposition for a quarter of a century, won the presidential election. It was the first time since independence that power passed peacefully to an opposition candidate, and it was watched across Africa as a model of a democratic handover done without violence.

Democracy then did the thing that proves it is real: it changed hands again. In the general election of 2025, United Seychelles, the movement founded by René and out of power since 2020, returned. Its candidate Patrick Herminie won the October run-off against President Ramkalawan by 52.7 percent to 47.3, and the party also retook the National Assembly. Herminie became the sixth president of Seychelles. A country that began its independence with a coup now changes its government at the ballot box, which is no small thing to have built in fifty years.