How Kenya’s opposition can defeat President William Ruto in 2027

In order to win in 2027 the opposition has to be bigger than the sum of its regional components; and engineer a wave election

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This is the third installment in a four part series to mark the first anniversary of the June 25, 2024 protests. The first post discussed the state of the Kenyan economy under President William Ruto. The second post argued that despite his ongoing political troubles President Ruto still has a good shot at reelection in 2027. The final post will offer a general commentary on how the current moment fits within the wider historical political economy of Kenya. For background, be sure to read the four pieces from last year in the aftermath of the protests here, here, here, and here.

I: A formidable but certainly beatable incumbent

In the previous post I argued that the fundamentals favor President William Ruto’s reelection in 2027. The economy is unlikely to experience a contraction over the next two years, with growth and other macro indicators being good enough to give Ruto a plausible case for running on the economy (or at least not having to completely cede the economy to his challenger). Furthermore, the fact that the election is very likely to be fought not on ideas but identity politics will boost Ruto’s chances of grinding out a victory. While Ruto may have completely lost the battle of narratives about his potential to be a transformative president, as the incumbent he’ll have the resources to define the possible ethnic alliance structures and then cobble together an elite coalition that can win along ethnic lines. Money still matters a great deal in Kenyan politics.

Police engage demonstrators in downtown Nairobi on June 25, 2025. Source: Bloomberg

That said, Ruto is certainly beatable in 2027 if the opposition can get its act together. This will require the Kenyan opposition to be much bigger than the sum of the respective voting blocs they bring to the table. To this end, they will have to elevate their game regarding voter outreach (especially in rural areas), pay attention to voters’ material concerns, mobilize millions of young low propensity voters, and fight voter apathy by deftly converting the widespread anger against the Ruto administration into actual votes. Finally, they’ll need a well-oiled vote protection machine that is robust to any rigging schemes that may be deployed by their opposite number.

It’s easy to imagine that nationwide disappointment with Ruto’s performance so far — expressed vividly in the scale and intensity of ongoing youth protests — will automatically translate into votes. That would be a mistake.

Don’t get me wrong. It takes a lot for disgruntled would-be voters to firm up their sense of political efficacy and repeatedly join protests at the risk of personal injury or death (at least 105 protestors have been killed by police over the last year). However, it’s also true that protestors don’t always become voters. This is especially true if change doesn’t come quickly. Perceived failure may breed despondency, forcing individuals to exit the political process. In addition, historical youth and urban turnout in Kenya leaves a lot to be desired.

The opposition must not wish away stylized facts about voter mobilization and turnout ahead of 2027.

Harnessing and converting the current anger into votes will take a lot of discipline and careful messaging. The idea should be to fight cynicism and keep the hope for change and a better future alive — by repeatedly demonstrating quick wins through street pressure and articulating the specifics of the opposition’s change agenda. This is the only strategy likely to persuade ever more young people to participate in politics (and as I noted in the previous post, Ruto’s camp will bank on extinguishing any hope that positive change is possible).

Overall, a wave election presents the opposition’s best chance of winning in 2027. And to have a wave election there has to be a generalized sense of inevitability of such an outcome. Below I outline what it would take to engineer a wave election in 2027.

II: How to engineer a wave election in 2027

There are two schools of thought on how the opposition should approach the 2027 presidential election. The first argues that the opposition should adeptly play the ethnic census game — by getting two of the “big five” ethic blocs as the formateur core then bringing in specific ethnic chiefs to top up on the road to 50% plus one votes. A variation of this strategy would involve forcing a runoff by running multiple presidential candidates and denying Ruto a first round win.

There are two problems with this strategy. First, an ethnic census election will undoubtedly depress turnout since it won’t offer any positive agenda for change and is likely to be marred by violence within and across ethnic groups. Second, it’s expensive to maintain elite pacts founded on the brokerage of ethnic blocs. If the game is that leaders can credibly walk with their ethnic bases intact, the price of coalition maintenance will go up. It shouldn’t be hard to see how such an inflationary spiral will favor the candidate that controls the Kenyan Treasury and state jobs.

The second school of thought, which I think has a better chance of yielding success, posits that the best change of beating Ruto is via a wave election founded on an idea and not necessarily identities — similar to the 2002 presidential election which was a rejection of the Moi era (notice that lots of Moi era alums rode the NARC wave). Notice that this isn’t to say that ethnicity won’t matter for coalition politics. My point is that a wave election will allow voters to project whatever they want onto the opposition coalition; and enable a layering of issue-based politics onto the ethnic mobilization strategies. More importantly, it would create space for a positive vision of change and give lots of people a reason to vote.

Ruto’s campaign would struggle against a clear and positively upbeat change message; especially contrasted against his campaign’s likely cynical deployment of negative political ethnicity. Indeed, to complement their upbeat forward-looking agenda the opposition should just run the tapes of Ruto making promises ahead of the 2022 election: no more grand corruption in government, no more extrajudicial killings by state security agents, no more weaponization of law enforcement and the justice system against critics, no more ethnic favoritism in the public sector, no more collapsing public services, and no more lawlessness and disdain for accountability in the presidency.

Engineering a wave election will require careful curation of a hopeful message on the economy, entrenching devolution, national renewal through constitutionalism, and a celebration of national unity in the person of a compromise presidential candidate. Let’s look at each of these in turn.

1) It’s the economy, stupid:

Given the protests over the last two years, steady erosion of government legitimacy, and Ruto’s terrible poll numbers, it might be tempting for the opposition to frame their campaign simply as a referendum on the person of William Ruto at the expense of focusing on the economy. That would be a huge strategic error. Despite his many failures as president, above all Ruto is a stand-in for a broken economic system that for too long has generated growth without an increase in real incomes (and produced a fair amount of visible inequality). Ruto ran on fixing that system in 2022 but once in office chose to reinforced it.

Therefore, the opposition’s challenge will be to convince the public that they aren’t simply interested in ousting Ruto but in unrigging the same system.

It’s hard to overstate this point. Claims that Ruto is a singularly bad president or that he’s a reincarnation of President Daniel arap Moi (and related ethnic dog whistles) are unlikely to stick. Ruto is not Moi. He’s a highly transactional politician who is very good at retail politics across ethnic lines. Due to his charisma, he will be able to hold his ground on a head-to-head comparison with, say, Uhuru Kenyatta (whether it’s on the rule of law, extrajudicial killings, grand corruption, growth and macro stability, etc). It follows that the economy as it pertains to households’ ability to get ahead should be the dominant issue in the 2027 campaign.

The opposition should definitely exploit the non-economic narratives against Ruto’s administration. But they should not make them the cornerstone of their campaign.

Successful messaging on the economy will require a lot of discipline and professionalism — both of which don’t come naturally to most Kenyan politicians.

To be blunt, most Kenyan politicians are very bad at politics. More often than not, what passes for “strategy” in their world is a magical belief in secret “weird tricks” (such as the announcement of defections of ethnic kingpins or show of might in large rallies). Campaigns barely invest in polling, professional policy development, strategic communication, or candidate recruitment. Thoroughly disorganized informality reigns. And a lot gets done (haphazardly) purely based on vibes.

This is partially why one of Ruto’s superpowers in 2022 was his ability to be minimally organized and disciplined in relaying a simple economic message that touched millions of Kenyans wherever they worked and lived. This was a stark contrast to Odinga’s campaign which was completely at sea on the policy communication front.

The opposition must learn the right lessons from the 2022 campaign as they litigate Ruto’s record. They should turn the “hustlers” vs “dynasties” messaging against his campaign; recruit a competent chief economic adviser and have them be the main spokesperson for the campaign; use evidence to tailor messaging (invest in focus groups and scientific polling!!), but without seeming too scripted; and expertly amplify what people feel in their pockets on a daily basis. All this should be done with the understanding that Ruto will not be completely defenseless on the economy.

2) Promise to make devolution work:

Devolution is the crown jewel of the 2010 constitution. Which is why it’s unfortunate that Ruto (and Kenyatta before him) doesn’t believe in the constitutional promise of the 47 counties working as experiments in pro-growth self-government. The persistence of the imperial presidency that doles out discretionary development projects (as has been the case under both Kenyatta and Ruto) represents a massive failure in implementing the 2010 constitution.

In general, Kenyan politicians’ neglect of devolution is yet another illustration of their being bad at politics. Devolution is popular. And I believe that a promise to faithfully implement devolution — by increasing the share of funds flowing to counties, enforcing public finance management laws at the county level, skilling county-level staff to deliver, and scaling back the role of the presidency in grassroots development — would be massively popular, too. A pro-devolution campaign would provide a sharp contrast against Ruto’s style as a micromanager who seldom delegates and is obsessed with cutting ribbons at every proverbial cattle dip in the land.

The opposition’s promise should be a reimagining of the counties as engines of policy experimentation and economic development (and not the facilitators of looting that they’ve become). They should back this promise with professional policy support for affiliated gubernatorial candidates and promises of concrete legislative protections (especially with regard to fiscal transfers) for devolved functions in the counties.

3) Aspire for national renewal through constitutionalism and a new social contract:

There’s no denying that the quality of public services in Kenya has deteriorated substantially in the recent past. This partially explains the recent surge in protests, especially in opposition to tax hikes.

To be fair, this trend preceded Ruto by decades. Kenyan policymaking has steadily atrophied since the early 1970s. Over the same time period the state failed to avail the resources to match increased demand for public services due to population growth.

Ruto’s sin is that since taking power he’s acted like this isn’t a problem. Instead, he’s dabbled in haphazard reforms whose net effect have been to make things worse for a large share of Kenyans; while also hiking taxes across the board. The many cases of policy failures and the public’s exposure to deteriorating services have significantly eroded state legitimacy and general belief in Project Kenya.

This reality presents an opening for the opposition to kill two birds with one stone: campaign on championing constitutionalism and rule of law, while explicitly tying both to improvements in service delivery as part of a new social contract.

I say this because there will be a temptation to try and “lawyer away” at Ruto in light of the numerous instances in which his administration has violated the constitution and trashed human rights. My contention is that those lawyerly punches will only land if they are explicitly tied to a new social contract that commits the national and county governments to better service delivery — especially in the education, health, and agriculture sectors. “You can’t eat constitutionalism” is a lesson that must be internalized by all.

4) The opposition should promptly settle on a compromise candidate and core policy leadership; and the. build a winning campaign infrastructure that goes after every vote ahead of time

Given the many egos at play within the ranks of the opposition, there will be the temptation to deploy “one weird trick” close to the election, if only to avoid a fallout. There will also be the push to nominate a saintly newcomer. Both of these impulses are unlikely to generate the winning formula. The opposition would be best if served by selecting a candidate as early as possible. The goal should be to pick someone that can win based on evidence from credible scientific polls.

An early selection will enable the opposition to own the initiative and provide enough time to build the campaign infrastructure needed to win. Part of this would include signaling credibility by putting together the core economic policy team (Treasury, Planning, Agriculture, Industry and Trade, Infrastructure, and Public Service) well in advance and getting them ready to hit the ground running in the event of a victory (recall that Ruto basically never recovered from his first mediocre cabinet, arguably one of the weakest in Kenya’s history).

The opposition should also deliberately try to force a split within Ruto’s coalition ahead of 2027. A possible way to go about this would be to shift the ground through direct appeals to voters. The goal should be to generate a bandwagon effect in early 2027, make the election outcome seem inevitable, and force as many defections as possible.

5) Avoid unnecessary distractions

Ruto’s campaign will try everything in their power to keep the opposition distracted, divided, and in reactive mode. This will include playing the ref (IEBC), harassment of key leaders using lawfare, attempts at poaching (and rumors of the same), and the abuse of state resources to bolster the president’s electoral prospects. These efforts will undoubtedly be aided by the perfidious culture among Kenya’s ruling class.

Disciplined execution of the main campaign strategy, and not constant reaction to the latest presidential outrage, should be the goal. The opposition cannot afford to be “out-disciplined” by the Ruto campaign.

To reiterate, a closely fought election on Ruto’s terms will almost guarantee his reelection. The point should be to generate a wave election that overwhelms any and all attempts to tilt the playing field.

III: Conclusion

As was clear during this year’s Saba Saba demonstrations, there is widespread popular disapproval of the Ruto administration. It’s also clear that the administration has chosen to double down on repression instead of a good faith dialogue and credible commitment to the much-needed reforms being pushed for by the protesters. This means that the protests (and police killings) won’t abate any time soon.

Under the circumstances, it’s easy to imagine that Ruto’s defeat in 2027 is inevitable. In this post I’ve argued that the widespread protests and disgruntlement with the Ruto administration will not guarantee an opposition victory in 2027. To convert the discontent into actual votes will require having a united opposition atop a disciplined professional campaign focused on the economy, entrenching devolution, and a renewal of the national social contract through constitutionalism and effective service delivery.