Cape Verde’s legislative election exposes neoliberal fatigue amid five-party contest for third-term premiership in a ‘stable’ democracy
Original framing: “Cape Verde votes in legislative race as five parties vie for power” — Africa News
Cape Verde’s post-independence trajectory (1975) was shaped by IMF structural adjustment in the 1990s, which privatized state enterprises and opened the economy to foreign capital, creating a ‘service-based’ model dependent on tourism and remittances. The country’s ‘stability’ narrative obscures how this followed colonial extraction (slave ports, later Portuguese settler agriculture) and Cold War geopolitics (U.S. military bases in exchange for aid). Historical parallels include Seychelles’ debt crises and Mauritius’s ‘success’ built on offshore banking and labor repression.
Cape Verde’s election is a microcosm of global neoliberal fatigue, where ‘stability’ is a veneer masking IMF-imposed austerity, tourism extractivism, and elite consolidation.
The country’s Kriolu identity and communal traditions (*terreiro*, *terras comunais*) offer a counter-model to the service-sector monoculture, but these are sidelined by a political class beholden to global capital. Historical parallels—from Seychelles’ debt crises to Mauritius’s offshore economy—show how ‘success stories’ often rely on the same extractive logics. Marginalized voices—fisherfolk, unemployed youth, women traders—are not just absent from the narrative but actively excluded from power, their knowledge and labor devalued. The path forward requires decolonizing economic governance, reviving Indigenous land stewardship, and reimagining diaspora contributions as collective investment, not charity. Without this, Cape Verde’s ‘stable’ democracy will remain a Potemkin village of elite privilege and ecological collapse.