A prominent opponent of Rwandan President Paul Kagame, Diane Rwigara, expressed her disappointment on Friday after being barred from participating in the upcoming election, challenging Kagame’s nearly three-decade rule.
Rwigara, leader of the People Salvation Movement, announced her candidacy in May and submitted her application last week. However, her name was absent from the provisional candidate list released by the electoral commission on Thursday. The commission cited her failure to provide a required criminal record statement and to gather the necessary 600 supporting signatures from citizens.
“After all the time, work, and effort I put in, I am very disappointed to hear I am not on the list of presidential candidates,” Rwigara, who was also disqualified from the 2017 election, said on X. “Paul Kagame, why won’t you let me run?”
Only two candidates, Frank Habineza of the Democratic Green Party and independent Philippe Mpayimana, were approved to run against Kagame. The final candidate list will be announced on June 14, a month before the presidential and parliamentary elections on July 15.
In 2017, Rwigara was barred from the presidential race due to allegations of forging supporters’ signatures. She was later arrested, charged with forgery and inciting insurrection, and detained for over a year.
Rwigara is the daughter of industrialist Assinapol Rwigara, a former major donor to Kagame’s ruling Rwandan Patriotic Front party, who later fell out with its leaders.
Kagame, Rwanda’s de facto leader since the 1994 genocide and president since 2000, has won three elections with over 90 percent of the vote and is widely expected to win again in July. While praised for Rwanda’s economic transformation post-genocide, Kagame faces frequent criticism over human rights abuses and intolerance of opposition. In the lead-up to this election, Rwandan courts rejected appeals from prominent opposition figures Bernard Ntaganda and Victoire Ingabire to remove previous convictions, barring them from running.
