As 2025 progressed, the electoral timeline that the Transitional Presidential Council had declared — with elections to be completed by February 7, 2026, when the council’s mandate expired — was being assessed by electoral experts and security analysts as increasingly unrealistic given conditions on the ground. The combination of gang control over much of the country’s territory, inadequate voter registration infrastructure, absence of a functioning electoral council, and insufficient security for campaign activities made the February 2026 target essentially impossible.
Electoral organization required specific preconditions that Haiti had not yet established: a functioning Provisional Electoral Council with adequate staff and resources, a voter registration process that reached all Haitians including those in gang-controlled areas, security conditions that allowed candidates to campaign freely and voters to reach polling stations safely, and civic education programs that informed citizens about the process. None of these preconditions were in place as 2025 entered its final months.
The political debate about how to manage the TPC mandate expiration without elections having been organized was intense and contentious. Some actors argued for legal mechanisms that could extend the transitional period; others warned that any extension without constitutional authorization would deepen the crisis rather than resolve it; still others called for a consensus political agreement that could provide legitimacy for a continued transitional period while elections were organized.
Haitian civil society organizations insisted that whatever solution was adopted for the mandate expiration needed to maintain a genuine commitment to elections with a credible timeline. They warned against a scenario in which the technical impossibility of the February 2026 target was used to indefinitely defer elections without any concrete new commitment, perpetuating the democratic deficit that had been at the core of Haiti’s governance crisis for years.