The Blind Spot: in Congo the opposition rejects the constitutional referendum, and does so from Rome
The Democratic Republic of Congo has adopted the law on the constitutional referendum contested by the opposition; the coalition rejecting it signed its own statement in Rome, without the news finding space in the Italian press.
In the Democratic Republic of Congo the political climate remains highly tense following the adoption, by the National Assembly, of the law governing the holding of a constitutional referendum. The measure is contested by a significant part of the opposition, gathered around the Article 64 coalition, known by its acronym C64.
The Congolese opposition accuses the referendum project of potentially allowing President Félix Tshisekedi to run for a new term after 2028, bypassing the limits currently in place. In a statement signed on October 27, the C64 coalition announced its intention to open direct talks with President Tshisekedi and his predecessor Joseph Kabila, in an attempt to find a channel for dialogue before any eventual vote.
The detail that makes this story relevant even for readers here is geographical, not only political: the C64 coalition’s statement was not signed in Kinshasa, but in Rome. Part of the political confrontation over a possible constitutional amendment affecting the institutional future of a country of tens of millions of inhabitants is thus taking place, at least in part, on Italian soil, through the diaspora and the diplomatic channels of the opposition coalition.
At the time of publication, none of the major Italian outlets appear to have covered the news. The sources available for this reconstruction come from a regional press review of Central and East Africa, a report picked up from Radio France Internationale and an outlet specializing in Congolese news — none of them Italian.
The relevance criterion does not concern only the physical presence of the statement in Rome. It also concerns the fact that a constitutional amendment extending a head of state’s time in power is an issue that crosses, in different forms, several continents, and that the location chosen to discuss it — a European capital, not the Congolese capital — signals how much African political dynamics now also pass through European cities, Rome included, without this automatically translating into local media attention.
The matter remains open: the referendum law has been adopted, the C64 coalition is calling for direct talks with Tshisekedi and Kabila, and the request for dialogue signed in Rome on October 27 has not yet received, according to the available sources, a public response from Kinshasa.
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