December 2025 arrived with Haiti’s elections still not organized and the February 7, 2026 expiration of the Transitional Presidential Council’s mandate approaching with no clear mechanism for managing the transition. The electoral calendar that the TPC had approved in December 2024 — targeting a first round in August 2026 — had acknowledged the impossibility of the February 2026 deadline, but the legal framework for continuing transitional governance beyond February remained contested.
The Provisional Electoral Council that was supposed to organize elections had been established but remained in early operational stages, with voter registration not having begun in any systematic way and the security conditions needed for electoral activities not yet existing across the country. The fundamental prerequisites for credible elections — security, civic education, candidate registration, logistical preparation — were all at initial stages at best.
Political actors were engaged in discussions about how to manage the February 2026 mandate expiration, with various proposals for legal mechanisms to authorize a continuation of transitional governance. The debates were technically complex and politically sensitive, with different actors having different interests in the specific form of any continuation arrangement.
Haitian civil society organizations warned against a political discussion focused entirely on the mechanics of extending governance arrangements without adequate attention to the substantive commitments — security improvement, electoral organization, humanitarian response — that the extension needed to be predicated on. They insisted that any continuation of transitional governance without genuine progress on these core commitments would represent a failure, not a solution, regardless of its legal form.