Félix Tshisekedi

Félix Tshisekedi (born June 13, 1963, Léopoldville, Republic of the Congo [now Kinshasa, Democratic Republic of the Congo]) is a Congolese politician who has served as the fifth president of the Democratic Republic of the Congo (DRC) since 2019.

Early life, family, and exile

Tshisekedi was born to Congolese politician Étienne Tshisekedi and his wife, Marthe Kasalu Jibikila. Étienne Tshisekedi held multiple high-ranking positions in the government during his career, and the family lived a comfortable lifestyle. However, the family’s fortunes dramatically shifted in the 1980s, when Étienne Tshisekedi’s tenuous relationship with the country’s dictatorial president, Mobutu Sese Seko, broke down. He was imprisoned (1980–82) and in 1982 founded the Union for Democracy and Social Progress (UDPS), a political party that stood in opposition to Mobutu. Mobutu responded in 1983 by exiling Étienne Tshisekedi and his family to his ancestral village, Mupompa, in Kasaï-Oriental province. Félix Tshisekedi was 20 years old.

In 1985 Mobutu allowed Félix Tshisekedi, his mother, and his siblings to leave, and they emigrated to Belgium. While there, Tshisekedi met a Congolese caregiver named Denise Nyakéru, and they married in 1996. They have five children.

Entrance into politics and presidential campaign

According to some, Tshisekedi was long involved with the UDPS in Belgium during his time there. In 2008 his profile rose when he became the party’s national secretary for external relations. Tshisekedi returned to the DRC in 2011, and that November he won a seat in the country’s legislature. However, he refused to take it up, in protest against his father’s loss of the presidential election to Joseph Kabila, which he and others claimed to have been the result of electoral fraud. In October 2016 he became the UDPS’s deputy secretary-general.

On February 1, 2017, Tshisekedi’s father died in a Brussels hospital. He took his father’s place as president of the UDPS in March 2018. That November Tshisekedi joined the leaders of other DRC opposition parties in Geneva to agree on a single candidate to run against Kabila’s chosen heir, Emmanuel Ramazani Shadary, in the upcoming presidential election. Martin Fayulu, of the Engagement for Citizenship and Development Party, was chosen. UDPS supporters were unhappy with the choice of Fayulu and protested against the decision, which led Tshisekedi to quickly withdraw from the Geneva agreement so he could run on his own ticket.

Tshisekedi was declared the winner of the December 30 election, having garnered more than 38 percent of the vote; Fayulu came in a close second, Shadary a distant third. But the results contradicted a wealth of evidence that Fayulu had received the most votes. Many people theorized that Kabila had fixed the election for Tshisekedi in return for a promise to protect the former’s interests—an accusation that both Tshisekedi and Kabila denied. Fayulu launched a legal challenge of the results, but the DRC’s Constitutional Court upheld Tshisekedi’s win. As suspicious as the circumstances were, Tshisekedi’s inauguration as president on January 24, 2019, nevertheless represented a major milestone: it was the first peaceful transfer of power in the history of the DRC.

Presidency

During his presidential campaign, Tshisekedi had declared his intention to transform the DRC into the economic “Germany of Africa,” but his ambitions faced strong headwinds. Although Tshisekedi now ran the executive branch, Kabila’s Common Front for Congo (Front Commun pour le Congo; FCC) coalition continued to dominate the legislature, effectively forcing the president to share power with his predecessor. Furthermore, Tshisekedi inherited the DRC’s decades-long security issues: numerous armed groups—some with thousands of fighters capable of occupying population centers—ran amok in the eastern provinces.

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Tshisekedi solved the problem of the FCC in December 2020 by luring away many of its members into a new coalition, the Sacred Union of the Nation (Union Sacrée de la Nation; USN). This mass transfer of allegiance was achieved partly by carrot—enticements such as new government positions and promises to look after various members’ interests—but also by stick: Tshisekedi threatened to dissolve the National Assembly altogether if he did not obtain enough votes to form a new government. The risky move paid off, giving Tshisekedi the legislature he needed to pursue his agenda.

Tshisekedi’s plans led to mixed results. Economically, the DRC performed relatively well, and Tshisekedi was able to introduce free primary education across the country, as well as free health care for mothers giving birth at many of Kinshasa’s public health centers and hospitals. The health care program later expanded to other parts of the country. But high inflation heavily affected citizens’ quality of life, and the violence in the eastern DRC went from bad to worse.

Tshisekedi faced several challengers in the next presidential election, held on December 20, 2023. The country’s election commission declared him the winner, claiming that he had taken 73.5 percent of the vote. However, his opponents rejected this result and called the election a sham, citing logistical problems and other issues that they said had affected the tally. Nevertheless, the Constitutional Court upheld Tshisekedi’s victory, and on January 20, 2024, he was sworn in for a second term.

In the early hours of May 19, 2024, the presidential palace and the residence of one of Tshisekedi’s allies were attacked in an attempted coup. The assault was led by a little-known opposition figure named Christian Malanga, who had spent much of his life in the United States and had formed the New Zaire movement (Zaire had been the name of the DRC from 1971 to 1997). The coup attempt failed: Malanga was among those killed as security forces responded to the attack, and roughly 50 people were arrested afterward. Later in 2024 many of those arrested were sentenced to death, but in April 2025 Tshisekedi commuted the death sentences of three of the conspirators (all American citizens, including Malanga’s son) to life imprisonment, and they were returned to the United States later that month.

Meanwhile, in spite of repeated mediation attempts, security in the eastern provinces deteriorated further, largely because of the actions of the Rwandan-sponsored M23 rebel group, which had seized two important provincial capitals in early 2025. Observers were cautiously optimistic that the situation would improve when Tshisekedi and the DRC government, which had long refused to negotiate directly with M23, agreed to meet with the group in March. However, at the last minute M23 withdrew from the planned talks. Tshisekedi did meet with Rwandan Pres. Paul Kagame that month, which was viewed as a positive development, as were talks in Doha, Qatar, between M23 and the Congolese government in the following months.