South Sudan's first national vote slips again, landing on February 2027

The National Election Commission's revised timetable, published Saturday on social media, sets Feb. 11, 2027 as polling day. That replaces Dec. 22. The document gave no reason for the postponement. The announcement landed on the very day voter registration was scheduled to begin.

Registration will now run Nov. 14 to Nov. 28 at 3,161 centers spread across the country's 10 states and three administrative areas, commission chairperson Gabriel Bol Deng told journalists in Juba a day before the timetable appeared. He urged eligible citizens to sign up and called on political parties, civil society groups, community leaders and the media to help raise public awareness.

Delays are nothing new: polls were pushed in 2022 and 2024, and this latest move follows warnings that voting could further unravel South Sudan's fragile peace. The country broke from Sudan in 2011 after decades of civil war, then slid into a new conflict in 2013 between forces loyal to President Salva Kiir and followers of his rival, Riek Machar. A 2018 peace deal produced a transitional unity government in 2020 — that body was dissolved in September and replaced by a caretaker administration.

Machar has been under house arrest in Juba since March 2025, after fighting between government and opposition forces escalated. He and seven co-defendants are on trial on charges including treason, murder and crimes against humanity tied to an attack on an army garrison in Nasir, in the northeast. They deny the charges.

The South Sudan Civil Society Forum warned in a late October statement that conditions did not support fair, credible, peaceful and inclusive elections in the time remaining, and called for an inclusive dialogue on electoral preparations and the transition. Anita Kiki Gbeho, head of the United Nations Mission in South Sudan, told the Security Council on Nov. 10 that Kiir's ruling Sudan People's Liberation Movement has been holding primaries nationwide while other registered parties show little electoral activity. “Elections must be a milestone in the transition, not its conclusion,” she said.

Security is already biting. Two SPLM delegates were killed Thursday in an attack in Miri Loko village, in Western Equatoria state, while returning from party primaries and congresses — the third security incident to hit the party's primaries and congresses in that state, according to Deng Dau Deng, who chairs the SPLM's high-level committee there. One of the dead was Veronica Lucy Gordon, a former South Sudan Broadcasting Corporation journalist recently nominated to contest a women's seat in the National Legislative Assembly. Edmund Yakani, director of the Community Empowerment for Progress Organization, condemned the attack and, after the postponement, demanded transparency from the commission, saying registration center locations were still unpublished on the day sign-ups were due to start.