The Republic of Somaliland is wedged uneasily on the Horn of Africa between Djibouti, Ethiopia, and Somalia, the latter two of which have been locked in a diplomatic cold war over the prospect of recognising the breakaway nation. It is only recognised by Taiwan.

Somaliland went to the polls last week, for the ninth time since it declared independence from Somalia in 1991. The election has resulted not just in a political earthquake at home, but in the most vivid demonstration yet of Somaliland’s efforts to project itself as a leading democracy in the region.

The former speaker of the Somaliland House of Representatives, Abdirahman Mohamed Abdullahi and his Waddani party declared victory over the incumbent, President Muse Bihi Abdi, in a decisive rejection of the Kulmiye party’s administration. This is the first change in government since 2010. As was the case in the US election this month, a vote which was anticipated to break narrowly for the incumbent produced a blow-out win for the opposition. The margins dwarfed those of Trump’s over Harris; Abdullahi won nearly 64 per cent of the vote, to Abdi’s 35 per cent.

The poll was delayed from November 2022 by conflict with the neighbouring SSC-Khatumo administration in a region of northern Somalia. And in a year in which incumbents around the world have been pummelled by economic headwinds (youth unemployment hovers around 70 per cent in Somaliland), issues around sovereignty and international recognition still dominated the campaign.

The shape of Somaliland’s borders has been fraught for centuries. Ports at Seylac and Berbera were governed variously by Somali Islamic Sultanates from the 14th to the 19th century. As European nations partitioned Africa, the protectorate of British Somaliland formalised the seizure of the territory from Egypt in 1884. Bloody civil conflicts followed the First World War, between the British and rebel Dervish forces, and killed around a third of Somaliland’s population.

British Somaliland was absorbed alongside Italian Somaliland into the new unified Republic of Somalia in 1960. As the new Somali republic became gripped by civil war, culminating in the fall of Siad Barre’s government in 1991, Somaliland seceded a few months later. By 1992 Somalia had been declared a ‘failed state’ by UN military observers, while the new Somaliland carried out its first presidential election.

Ray Hartley, Director of Research at the Johannesburg-based think tank the Brenthurst Foundation and a former newspaper editor, was an international observer for this latest presidential election. He took part in an international mission alongside a former Zimbabwean finance minister, a Kenyan opposition leader, and a former senior officer in the British Army.

Hartley has observed elections in Kenya, Lesotho and Liberia, and told me that this vote was held to an ‘extraordinarily good standard’.

‘It’s a very poor country, but they have a very interesting system where they deploy university students. They train them up and deploy them to areas where they don’t come from,’ says Hartley. ‘You see them for the first time on election day, and then they go back home after that. So, there can be no sort of local clan-type interference or any of that.’

Hartley was based at a polling centre set up across a handful of classrooms at a school in Berbera, on the coast. It was a familiar scene for participants in elections through 2024. Less familiar, however, was the system of iris scanning, hooked up to a centralised government database, to corroborate paper records held in each polling station.

There are caveats to Somaliland’s democracy. For one, while turnout was relatively strong, at 53 per cent, this only counts registered voters. For reference, 647,863 votes were counted from a population estimated at 6.2 million. Some rural communities remain beyond the reach of the electoral process.

Yet, for a country which remains one of the most impoverished in the world, pastoral and with patchy access to electricity, the robustness of its electoral system is striking. Hartley notes that issues with the 2021 elections, which he had also observed, have been largely resolved. ‘You could see these newly installed pretty uniform large bulbs that capture energy when the electricity is on and then they have light for the night and the procedures and so on.’ Election observers were equipped with head torches as a failsafe in case of power failures.

Despite this progress, Somaliland remains a diplomatic pariah on the Horn of Africa. In January, a memorandum of understanding signed with Ethiopia was poised to exchange valuable seaport access for formal recognition of Somaliland. The Somali government branded the deal as an ‘act of aggression’.

The deal now faces an uncertain future, and tense meetings ensued over the summer brokered by Turkey between Ethiopian and Somali diplomats. Mogadishu has leveraged broadly held fears within the African Union (AU) that formal recognition of Somaliland would set a precedent that could embolden secessionist movements across the continent.

The commercial pull is strong. For Ethiopia, a major African power with a population of 127 million people, Somaliland represents a safe, direct and flat trading route to the Red Sea. For all its diplomatic clout, Somalia – violent, circuitous and hilly – offers none of these upsides.

This war of words was put to one side on Tuesday, with the Somali government quick to congratulate the incoming president Abdullahi in a message that signed off with an eyebrow-raising reference to ‘reconciliation talks, which are focussed on preserving the unity of Somalia’. Could this message indicate a reset in the relationship, or something more ominous?

Hartley is unphased by these inferences. ‘Somalilanders are proud of their independence, and they’ve seen the results of it.’ He points out that the signals from Ethiopia are warm. ‘I think Ethiopia has come as close as you can to recognising Somaliland without saying so. They immediately congratulated Somaliland on its election, and if you look at the wording of that announcement, clearly talking of Somaliland as an independent country, not as a territory of another country. So, I think they’re very close.’

‘The problem for the AU is that there’s a long queue of people who want recognition, and there’s a long queue of governments that don’t want to recognise.’

Might Somaliland be able to exploit a fractious geopolitical moment? This week, the former British Defence Secretary Gavin Williamson suggested that president-elect Trump could be prepared to unilaterally recognise Somaliland.

It remains to be seen whether the incoming US president would find the time or political bandwidth to recognise Somaliland amongs a frenetic foreign policy agenda. And, with the nomination of a relative establishment Republican in Marco Rubio to the State Department, can there be any reliance on the same diplomatic spasms that characterised the first Trump administration?

Somaliland’s status in the region is rich in contradictions: almost totally unrecognised, but a local exemplar of democracy; deeply impoverished, yet relatively free from violence; a promising trade partner, but with political consequences for any such partners.

As Somaliland takes a confident step forward in its democracy, is the international community ready to accept the territory into the fold?