Thirty years is not a losing streak; it’s a foundation

By Dr Bubacarr JB Touray

There’s a lazy way to read Ousainu Darboe’s career, and a lot of people take it. Count the presidential elections, 1996, 2001, 2006, 2021, now 2026; subtract the wins, and you get zero. Case closed, they say. Not electable.

But that arithmetic only works if you believe politics is a single race instead of a long argument a country has with itself. Darboe has been making the same argument since 1996: that Gambia deserves the rule of law, constitutional government, and a real check on executive power. He made that argument against Yahya Jammeh, a dictator who jailed him, whose supporters ambushed his campaign convoy, and who ran elections international observers openly called flawed. Losing to a rigged system isn’t proof of unelectability. It’s proof the system wasn’t built to let him win.

Here’s what the “not electable” crowd conveniently skips: the UDP doesn’t lose everywhere. In parliamentary and local government elections, the ones closer to the ground, harder to steal, easier for ordinary voters to swing on their own terms, the UDP has repeatedly come out on top, holding the largest opposition bloc in the National Assembly. That’s not the profile of a fringe figure nobody wants. That’s the profile of a party that wins the level of government voters control most directly and loses only the one office that a generation of authoritarian entrenchment made hardest to take.

Before any comparison, a harder question: what would it even take to prove him electable?

This is where the “not electable” charge starts to fall apart under its own weight. Ask yourself what evidence would ever satisfy it. If the answer is “nothing short of a win”, and it usually is, then the label isn’t an observation, it’s a circular trap. It predicts failure, that prediction discourages donors and dampens turnout, the discouraged turnout produces a weaker result, and the weaker result gets pointed to as proof the original prediction was right all along. That’s not analysis. That’s a prophecy wearing the costume of a fact, and it deserves to be named as one.

There’s a second thing worth noticing, and it’s not hypothetical: watch where Barrow actually spends his own campaign energy. At a National People’s Party rally in Brikama, with the presidency itself and years of infrastructure spending to defend, Barrow didn’t just make the case for his own record. He used the platform to go after Darboe by name, accusing him of exaggerating a power crisis and warning supporters they didn’t understand who they were really up against.

That is not how a sitting president treats a non-threat. Incumbents with real security don’t spend their own rally time relitigating a single opposition leader’s campaign video, they campaign past him, confident the math already favors them. The fact that Barrow keeps returning to Darboe, specifically, more than to any of the other opposition candidates on the ballot, is itself a data point. He is campaigning like a man who knows exactly which challenger could actually beat him.

And there’s a third flaw in judging Darboe off the scoreboard alone: a founder shouldn’t be judged only by the elections that happened before his movement matured. Measuring Darboe’s electability by 1996 or 2001 is like judging a company by its first product launch, before it had the infrastructure to actually deliver. The number that should worry his opponents isn’t any single loss. It’s the trend line, from zero institutional power in 1996 to the largest opposition bloc in the National Assembly today. Trend lines forecast futures. Single data points don’t.

Now, the honest counter-case, because a real argument answers its critics instead of ignoring them.

Fair-minded skeptics don’t stop at “he’s lost before.” They raise three sharper points, and each deserves a real answer.

First: he’s in his seventies, and a 2025 CepRass survey found a majority of Gambians actually wanted a younger UDP candidate, specifically Kanifing Mayor Talib Ahmed Bensouda, to replace him. That’s a real number, not a smear. But notice what it actually shows: Gambians want a UDP government. They’re arguing about who should carry the flag, not whether the party’s platform is right for the country.

A family disagreeing about who should drive doesn’t mean the family wants to go somewhere else. And when the UDP’s own delegates were given the actual choice at the ballot box in September 2025, they gave Darboe a decisive majority votes over two other contenders. The grassroots verdict and the opinion-poll snapshot told different stories, and the people with the actual vote chose experience.

Second: the party did face a real internal crisis, resignations, factional anger, accusations of a leader who wouldn’t step aside. That’s true and pretending otherwise would be dishonest. But a party arguing loudly with itself about succession is not a party in decline; it’s a party healthy enough to have the argument in public instead of purging it in silence. Darboe’s response, publicly urging members not to attack those who left, calling for unity, is the behavior of someone managing a transition, not someone clinging to power out of vanity.

Third, and most basic: five losses are still five losses, and repetition alone doesn’t earn anyone a presidency. Correct, persistence is not automatically vindication. But persistence changes what’s possible for the people who come after, and it’s worth asking what a UDP built without thirty years of Darboe’s groundwork would even look like. There’s a real chance it wouldn’t exist as a serious force at all. The infrastructure his persistence built, the parliamentary majority, the local government wins, a party disciplined enough to survive open internal warfare, is the actual asset on the table in 2026, whether or not it’s Darboe himself standing at the podium in State House.

Now the parallel, and it’s a closer match than people expect: Luiz Inácio Lula da Silva.

Lula ran for president of Brazil in 1989. Lost. Ran again in 1994. Lost. Ran again in 1998. Lost. Three defeats spread across nearly a decade, and Brazilian pundits said precisely what’s said about Darboe now, too identified with one era, his moment had come and gone, the country had moved on without him. Then he ran a fourth time in 2002 and won in a landslide, went on to preside over the largest reduction in poverty in Brazil’s modern history, and two decades later was still central enough to national politics to win the presidency again in 2022.

Same man. Same string of losses. Same eventual, decisive, personal victory, not a movement’s victory inherited by someone else, but his own. That’s the part that matters for Darboe’s case specifically: it wasn’t Lula’s proteges who eventually won while he receded into elder-statesman status. He won. The losses weren’t the ceiling. They were the runway.

Nobody today edits Lula’s biography to read “perennial loser.” History remembers the fourth campaign, not the first three, and it remembers it as vindication of the first three, not despite them. If Darboe wins in December, thirty years of “not electable” will read the same way: not as a losing streak that finally broke, but as the long, unglamorous work that made the win possible in the first place.

None of this guarantees a win.

Nobody sensible would promise that. Darboe faces real questions about age, about generational renewal inside his own party, about whether thirty years of familiarity has curdled into fatigue among some voters. Those are fair conversations. But they’re different conversations from “he’s not electable,” which isn’t really an argument, it’s a prediction dressed up as a verdict, delivered before the votes are even counted.

Thirty years in, Ousainu Darboe hasn’t lost the argument. He’s still making it, to a country that keeps sending his party to parliament and to local governments even while the presidency stays out of reach, and to an incumbent who, by his own choice of words at his own rallies, treats him as the one man standing in his way. History has a name for people who keep showing up after repeated defeat, right up until the moment the ground finally shifts under them. That name isn’t failure. It’s Lula, before 2002. It’s a founder, before the fourth act. It’s a man who convinced most of his country already, everywhere except the one office designed hardest to give up.