Thiam Steps Down Amid Mounting Legal and Political Pressure
Tidjane Thiam has resigned as leader of Côte d'Ivoire's Democratic Party , marking a significant shift in the country's political landscape ahead of the October 2025 presidential election. His departure follows a series of legal challenges and internal party disputes that have cast uncertainty over his political future.
Thiam, a former CEO of Credit Suisse and a prominent figure in international finance, assumed leadership of the PDCI-RDA in December 2023 with overwhelming support, securing 96.5% of the vote. His candidacy was seen as a rejuvenation of the party, aiming to challenge the long-standing dominance of President Alassane Ouattara's ruling party.
However, Thiam's presidential ambitions encountered a significant obstacle when an Ivorian court ruled him ineligible to run for office. The court cited his French citizenship at the time of his registration on the electoral roll, despite his renunciation of French nationality in February 2025. The ruling, based on Article 48 of the Ivorian Nationality Code, is final and not subject to appeal. Thiam criticized the decision as a politically motivated attempt to sideline a viable opposition candidate.
The court's decision has been met with criticism from various quarters, including a group of prominent academics who warned that disqualifying Thiam undermines democratic integrity and risks triggering instability in the country. They highlighted the irony of the situation, drawing parallels to President Ouattara's own past challenges with electoral eligibility.
Internally, the PDCI-RDA has been grappling with divisions over Thiam's leadership. Some party members initiated legal proceedings to remove him from the party's presidency, arguing that his previous dual nationality and insufficient tenure within the party's political bureau violated internal regulations. These internal disputes have further complicated the party's efforts to present a united front in the upcoming election.
See also Meta Faces Regulatory Showdown in Nigeria
Thiam's resignation leaves the PDCI-RDA at a crossroads, as it seeks to identify a new leader capable of galvanizing support and mounting a credible challenge to the ruling party. The party's ability to navigate this transition and maintain cohesion will be critical in the lead-up to the October election.
The broader political context in Côte d'Ivoire remains tense, with concerns about democratic backsliding and the potential for electoral unrest. Thiam's exit from the political stage underscores the challenges facing opposition parties in a political environment where legal and institutional mechanisms can be leveraged to limit competition.
Hashtags
Try Our AI Features
Explore what Daily8 AI can do for you:
Comments
No comments yet...
Related Articles
Al Etihad
11 hours ago
- Al Etihad
Meta creating new AI lab to pursue ‘superintelligence'
10 June 2025 23:12 SAN FRANCISCO (THE NEW YORK TIMES NEW SERVICE)Meta is preparing to unveil a new artificial intelligence research lab dedicated to pursuing "superintelligence,' a hypothetical AI system that exceeds the powers of the human brain, as the tech giant jockeys to stay competitive in the technology has tapped Alexandr Wang, 28, the founder and CEO of AI startup Scale AI, to join the new lab, sources said, and has been in talks to invest billions of dollars in his company as part of a deal that would also bring other Scale AI employees to the has reportedly offered seven- to nine-figure compensation packages to dozens of researchers from leading AI companies such as OpenAI and Google, with some agreeing to join, sources new lab is part of a larger reorganisation of Meta's AI Zuckerberg, Meta's CEO, has invested billions of dollars into turning his company, which owns Facebook, Instagram and WhatsApp, into an AI OpenAI released the ChatGPT chatbot in 2022, the tech industry has raced to build increasingly powerful AI. Zuckerberg has pushed his company to incorporate AI across its products, including in its smart glasses and a recently released app, Meta in the race is crucial for Meta, Google, Amazon and Microsoft, with the technology likely to be the future for the industry. The giants have pumped money into startups and their own AI has invested more than $13 billion in OpenAI, while Amazon has plowed $8 billion into AI startup behemoths have also spent billions to hire employees from high-profile startups and license their technology. Last year, Google agreed to pay $3 billion to license technology and hire technologists and executives from a startup that builds chatbots for personal February, Zuckerberg, 41, called AI "potentially one of the most important innovations in history.' He added, "This year is going to set the course for the future.'Meta and Scale AI declined to comment. Bloomberg earlier reported that Wang was joining the new Meta is regarded by leading researchers to be a futuristic goal of AI Google and others have said their immediate aim is to build "artificial general intelligence,' or AGI, shorthand for a machine that can do anything the human brain can do, which is an ambition with no clear path to success. Superintelligence, if it can be developed, would go beyond AGI in its has invested in AI for more than a decade. Zuckerberg created the company's first dedicated AI lab in 2013, after losing out to Google in trying to acquire a seminal startup called DeepMind. DeepMind is now the core of Google's AI then, Meta's research efforts have been overseen by its chief AI scientist, Yann LeCun, who is also a New York University professor. LeCun is a pioneer of neural networks, the technology that drives ChatGPT and similar ChatGPT caused an explosion of interest in AI, Meta deployed additional resources to pursue the technology. One of Meta's strategies for gaining ground in AI has been to "open source' its software, essentially giving away its AI code freely so that developers and others adopt its tools. The company released an open-source AI model, Llama, and its chatbot product, Meta AI was incorporated across Facebook, Instagram and WhatsApp, as well as in its Ray-Ban smart glasses. In May, Zuckerberg said more than 1 billion people used Meta AI every month.
Al Etihad
11 hours ago
- Al Etihad
France's Mistral unveils its first 'reasoning' AI model
10 June 2025 23:31 PARIS (AFP)French artificial intelligence startup Mistral on Tuesday announced a so-called "reasoning" model it said was capable of working through complex problems, following in the footsteps of top US immediately on the company's platforms as well as the AI platform Hugging Face, the Magistral "is designed to think things through -- in ways familiar to us," Mistral said in a blog AI was designed for "general purpose use requiring longer thought processing and better accuracy" than its previous generations of large language models (LLMs), the company other "reasoning" models, Magistral displays a so-called "chain of thought" that purports to show how the system is approaching a problem given to it in natural means users in fields like law, finance, healthcare and government would receive "traceable reasoning that meets compliance requirements" as "every conclusion can be traced back through its logical steps", Mistral company's claim gestures towards the challenge of so-called "interpretability" -- working out how AI systems arrive at a given they are "trained" on gigantic corpuses of data rather than directly programmed by humans, much behaviour by AI systems remains impenetrable even to their also vaunted improved performance in software coding and creative writing by "reasoning" models include OpenAI's o3, some versions of Google's Gemini and Anthropic's Claude, or Chinese challenger DeepSeek's idea that AIs can "reason" was called into question this week by Apple -- the tech giant that has struggled to match achievements by leaders in the field. Several Apple researchers published a paper called "The Illusion of Thinking" that claimed to find "fundamental limitations in current models" which "fail to develop generalizable reasoning capabilities beyond certain complexity thresholds".
Al Etihad
16 hours ago
- Al Etihad
14-year-old student stabs to death assistant at French school
10 June 2025 18:06 NOGENT, FRANCE (AFP)French President Emmanuel Macron on Tuesday condemned "senseless... violence" after a 14-year-old pupil fatally stabbed a teaching assistant, the latest deadly incident at a school in the secondary school student was arrested after attacking the 31-year-old assistant with a knife during a bag search in Nogent in eastern France, officials has in recent years seen several attacks on teachers and pupils by other March, police started random searches for knives and other weapons concealed in bags at and around assistant at the Francoise Dolto school in Nogent was stabbed several times shortly before 8:00am, "as pupils were arriving for a visual inspection of their bags in the presence of the police", education officials suspect was taken into vehicles and police cars were parked outside the school at midday. Pupils has been sent home and classes were suspended for Tuesday and Wednesday."While protecting our children, a teaching assistant lost her life, the victim of a senseless wave of violence," Macron wrote on X."The nation is in mourning and the government is mobilised to reduce crime," he interior ministry said on Tuesday that between March 26 and May 26, 6,000 checks led to the seizure of 186 knives.
