I have had the opportunity to read, in The Elephants in the Room broad lines, a few of the proposals for electoral reform submitted on 30 January 2026 on the Government's invitation. The submissions are serious and engaged. Yet one crucial question remains largely unaddressed, or where it is addressed, it is insufficiently so. That question concerns political parties themselves, the (first) elephant in the room.
In the Mauritian constitutional model, as in the majority of constitutional systems worldwide, the political party enjoys constitutional recognition. This was understood from the very beginning. In a much-recalled and viewed interview, the late Yusuf Mohamed, SC, a witness of the time, explained how the colours of the Mauritian flag itself were actually associated with the four major political parties of the time: red for the Labour Party, blue for the Parti Mauricien social-démocrate (PMSD), yellow for the Independent Forward Bloc (IFB), and green for the Comité d'action musulman (CAM). Whatever one makes of that, there can be no question that the political party enjoys, in our constitutional model, a clear constitutional mooring or underpinning.
Section 59(3) of the Constitution provides that the President shall appoint as Prime Minister the person who, in his opinion, is best able to command the support of the majority of members of the National Assembly. In practice, this means the leader of the largest political party or party alliance in the Assembly. Sections 60(2), 64, and 73 repeatedly refer to political parties. More specifically, Schedule 2 of the Constitution establishes a formal regime for the registration of political parties and party alliances for the purposes of general elections, the declaration of party membership by candidates, and the identification of party leaders for electoral purposes.
Once it is accepted that political parties have that constitutional status, a deeper constitutional issue arises.
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Section 1 of the Constitution declares Mauritius to be a sovereign democratic State. While section 1 was initially seen by our Courts as a preambular clause, merely a sum of its parts, the position has since conclusively changed. In the 2004 case of State v Khoyratty, the Judicial Committee of the Privy Council, affirming the Supreme Court's earlier judgment in that case, explained that section 1 is operative and binding with "an exceptional degree of entrenchment" following the constitutional amendment of 1991. Section 1, in the words of the Judicial Committee, "contains a separate, substantial, guarantee".
Section 1 is therefore a self-standing foundational norm that pervades the entire constitutional structure, especially the institutions through which democracy is structured, including political parties.
Constitutional theory distinguishes between procedural democracy and substantive democracy. Procedural democracy focuses on electoral models, which, as I said above, has been very much the focus of the proposals for, as well as the debates on, electoral reform. Substantive democracy, for its part, deals with an equally, if not more, demanding question: whether the institutions that structure political power are themselves democratically legitimate. This is where we must scrutinise political parties.
The democratisation of political parties
Historically, this was not always regarded as a problem. Political parties were once viewed as private associations, and liberal constitutionalism was suspicious of regulating them. But that view has steadily eroded since the Second World War. Constitutional systems across Europe and the world gradually recognised parties as constitutional actors, and with that recognition, regulation followed, not as a threat to democracy, but as a means to preserving it.
The German Basic Law provides the clearest illustration. It constitutionally acknowledges the role of political parties in forming the political will of the people, but it also requires that their internal organisation conform to democratic principles. At a minimum, this entails regular, free and fair elections for party leadership and executive organs, capable of scrutiny.
Mauritius has never fully confronted this question.
Debates have tended to focus on party registration or financing, while their undemocratic internal functioning remained largely unscrutinised.
This is why our political parties, whether in or out of power, have extraordinarily long-standing leaderships, sometimes extending over decades and surviving repeated electoral defeats. Some parties have known only one dominant leader throughout their entire existence. Leadership contests are non-existent. If there is a change in leadership, often it is simply because of age catching up, or for the transfer of power to another family member.
The regulation of political parties has now become unavoidable because political parties, and in particular their leaderships, exercise enormous power within our democratic framework. They determine who may stand for elections, they define political agendas, and once in government, they control and determine both executive and legislative actions and outcomes.
This creates a constitutional paradox. At the heart of a State constitutionally declared to be democratic lies political parties that are themselves profoundly undemocratic. In stark contrast, in other spheres, we readily accept that entities, whether it be private companies, public companies, trusts, trade unions, professional bodies, sports federations, socio-cultural associations etc, must be regulated in recognition precisely of their public dimensions.
There can therefore be no principled objection to the regulation of political parties to ensure that they are democratic. On the contrary, it is now an imperative. Their internal functioning must be subject to serious scrutiny against democratic norms. A truly democratic party would have open memberships with the opportunities for one and all to contest for leadership roles.
The two other elephants
This leads us to two corollary questions regarding the present electoral reform initiative. They are the two other elephants in the room.
First, electoral reform cannot be meaningfully segregated from broader constitutional questions. The electoral system operates within a constitutional framework that empowers political parties. Any serious reform must therefore engage with that framework as a whole. The Government's approach to segregate electoral reform from a holistic constitutional review is hard to justify. In truth, that approach appears no more than a self-interested political compromise by and between the two main political parties in Government, which unwittingly exposes the very conflicts of interest to be guarded against.
Second, and more critically, there is a procedural and legitimacy problem. Who will judge and shape any such electoral reform? Undemocratic and unaccountable political parties cannot credibly be both the subjects of reform and its architects. No one can be judge and party at the same time. Political parties, whether in or out of power, are all interested actors. They cannot therefore claim the neutrality required to lead a process that may constrain their own power. Nor can that deficit be cured by setting up a supposedly 'independent' commission that is otherwise populated by political nominees or affiliates of these very political parties.
Electoral reform, in its true sense, cannot be party-driven. Worst still, it cannot be, as it is being suggested, a simple matter of a constitutional amendment being put to the vote in the National Assembly, which is itself populated by members likely to be subservient to the very political parties they belong to, but which precisely need to be reformed in the first place.
From a purely procedural and substantive standpoint, such an approach is constitutionally vulnerable, apart from lacking political legitimacy altogether.
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Now, both history and the Constitution provide a clear pathway forward. In the lead-up to independence, constitutional development in Mauritius was marked by broad, inclusive, and meaningful consultation and analysis spanning several years and extending beyond political parties. Once we arrived at a consensus on the Constitution and its electoral model in 1966, a serious debate followed as to whether that model ought to be endorsed popularly by referendum or in a general election. The latter was chosen.
Today, section 47(3) of the Constitution provides a pathway for popular endorsement regarding matters that go to the heart of our democracy. It is noteworthy in this regard that both the Labour Party and the MMM, in their respective challenges to the postponement of municipal elections in 2023 (Ramdass v The State and Hosseny v The State), argued that such postponements contravened section 47(3) and the deeply entrenched democratic guarantees of section 1. If their position was that a referendum under section 47(3) was required for the postponement of municipal elections, surely they cannot disagree that section 47(3) must then apply with full force to electoral reform.
Reform must begin where power actually lies
Comparative constitutional study demonstrate that the regulation and democratisation of political parties have most often emerged during periods of flux, for instance when leadership succession is uncertain, traditional authority structures are strained, and legitimacy is contested.
Mauritius is at such a juncture. With longstanding party leaderships ageing and succession pathways unclear, the question of internal party democracy can no longer be deferred. If electoral reform is to be credible, it must first and foremost start with the political parties themselves. This is what section 1 demands.
