 |
|---|
Elections in the Sahrawi Arab Democratic Republic are regularly held by the government-in-exile at a national, regional and local level. Elections are considered to be held under a non-partisan participatory democratic regime, as the Sahrawi Arab Democratic Republic (SADR) and the Polisario Front (the sole legally recognised political movement in the SADR, which leads to a de-facto one-party state) structures are parallel.
The SADR claims the Western Sahara, a territory largely administered by Morocco since Spain abandoned it in 1975. The sovereignty over Western Sahara is unresolved: the territory is contested by Morocco and the Polisario Front (Popular Front for the Liberation of the Saguia el Hamra and Río de Oro), a national liberation movement which formally proclaimed a government-in-exile in 27 February 1976. The United Nations, which considers Western Sahara to be a non-self-governing territory, has attempted to hold a referendum on the issue through the United Nations Mission for the Referendum in Western Sahara (MINURSO), which administered a ceasefire in place between September 1991 and November 2020.
The Constitution of the SADR, proclaimed in 1976 and amemded several times, stipulates that the current political system is an emergency mechanism, with the intention to establish a multi-party system as soon as the SADR manages to establish its authority in all of Western Sahara. The Polisario would then either be dissolved or transformed into an ordinary political party based on an extraordinary Congress.