Benin’s Failed Coup: Three Factors Behind The Takeover Attempt

By John Joseph Chin

• Growing autocratic rule, a rise in jihadist attacks and a proliferation of coups in the Sahel contributed to the attempt by Benin’s military to seize power

Military elements attempted to topple Benin’s government in early December 2025. However, unlike other coups across the Sahel and west Africa since 2020, this bid triggered a military response from Benin’s neighbours.

Benin is a west African state of 14.8 million people bordered by Togo, Burkina Faso, Niger and Nigeria.

Responding to two requests for assistance from the government of President Patrice Talon, Nigeria deployed fighter jets and the Economic Community of West African States (Ecowas) deployed elements of its standby force to target and dislodge the pro-coup forces.

Ecowas intervention likely played an important role in undermining the coup’s momentum and restoring order. The dozen or so putschists scored early tactical successes. They captured and broadcast from the national television station, occupied a military camp, and even took the two senior-most army officers hostage. But once Ecowas intervened militarily, any fence-sitters concluded that loyalists would prevail. Rather than a broad-based uprising, only 14 were arrested with a few plotters still at large.

I’m a scholar who maintains the Colpus dataset of coups and I have documented the history of post-second world war coups. As part of this work, I have sought to document the complex causes and effects of Africa’s post-2020 “epidemic of coups”, now entering its fifth year.

Though details remain scant on the motives of the coup plotters led by Lt. Col. Pascal Tigri, three structural factors likely contributed to the latest coup attempt:

• growing autocracy under Talon since 2016
• rising jihadist violence in Benin’s north that is spilling over from Sahel neighbours
• deepening coup contagion as Africa’s coup belt now threatens the west African region.

From democratic backsliding to democratic u-turn?

Benin does not have a history of recent coups. It had not suffered a bona fide coup attempt since January 1975.

In the first 15 years after independence from France in 1960, Dahomey (as the country was then called) experienced nine coup attempts, making it one of the most coup-prone countries in sub-Saharan Africa during the early Cold War period.

However, political instability through the early 1970s gave way to the stable and durable personalist regime of Mathieu Kérékou (1972-1990). This was followed by electoral democracy after the Cold War.

Until recently, Benin had been heralded as one of Africa’s “democratic outliers” and success cases of democratic survival despite challenging conditions. Though poor, Benin has seen decades of improving average living standards. Economic growth in 2025 was 7.5%; the latest unrest cannot be blamed on poverty or an economic crisis.

However, data on three key dimensions of democracy shows that although electoral contestation and participation have endured, constraints on the executive (and thus liberal democracy overall) have declined in Benin since Talon’s election as president in 2016.

According to autocratic regime data from US political scientists Barbara Geddes, Joe Wright and Erica Frantz as well as the Varieties of Democracy (V-Dem) project (which surveys experts about democracy worldwide), Benin slipped back into an electoral autocracy in 2019. That is when opposition candidates were prevented from competing in parliamentary elections. The polls were marred by repression of mass protests and an internet shutdown.

In 2021, an electoral boycott led to Talon’s easy re-election.

V-Dem data show a very partial and incomplete democratic rebound since 2022. The opposition was allowed to compete in the January 2023 parliamentary elections. And earlier this year Talon confirmed that he would not seek an unconstitutional third term.

The potential for a coup, however, was foreshadowed last fall when the regime alleged that it had uncovered a coup plot involving a presidential hopeful in 2026. Last month, parliament’s vote to create a Senate was condemned by the opposition as allowing Talon a means to influence affairs after he steps down.

With the main opposition party barred from running in next year’s presidential election, Talon is expected to hand off power to his ally and finance minister, Romuald Wadagni.

Though the political leanings of Tigri and coup plotters remain unclear, Tigri claimed to seek to “free the people from dictatorship”.

The coupmakers also presumably sought to block the upcoming 2026 parliamentary and presidential elections.

A growing jihadist threat

Among the coup leaders’ key complaints was Talon’s mismanagement of the country. In particular, they cited “continuing deterioration of the security situation in northern Benin and “the ignorance and neglect of the situation of our brothers in arms who have fallen at the front” due to worsening jihadist violence.

A number of coups in nearby countries since 2020 have been preceded by rising levels of political violence and deepening insecurity born of jihadist insurgencies. That was certainly the case in Mali, Burkina Faso and to a lesser extent Niger.

Since last year, it has been clear that the jihadist violence was spilling over from Sahel neighbours such as Burkina Faso and Niger into the borderlands of west Africa. This included Benin’s north. ACLED data show a major increase in political violence events since 2022. And a spike in political fatalities in 2024:

Much of this increased violence is attributable to the advance of operations by the al-Qaida affiliated group Jama’at Nusrat al-Islam wal-Muslimin (JNIM). The group also managed to launch its first fatal attack in Nigeria at the end of October.

Russia has become the primary security partner for the Sahel Alliance. The defence pact was signed in 2023 by post-coup juntas of Burkina Faso, Mali and Niger to defeat jihadists and maintain power.

Nevertheless, Benin has continued to rely on western security partners to aid its counter-insurgency efforts and bolster border security. Notably, Benin continues to welcome military cooperation with France. Since 2022 Paris has pledged greater military aid to combat terrorism.

In September, US Africa Command commander General Dagvin Anderson visited Benin to underscore cooperation to oppose terrorism.

During the coup attempt, Tigri reportedly warned against French intervention and railed against “imperialism”. The speech reportedly ended with the phrase “The Republic or Death”, which echoes the new motto of Burkina Faso’s junta.

This suggests that the coup makers may have been inspired by others in the Sahel.

Risk of the coup belt expanding

The Benin events mark the third coup attempt and first failed coup this year in the Sahel region. There have been 17 coup attempts in Africa since 2020, including 11 successful coups. This makes the African coup belt stretching across the Sahel and west Africa the global epicentre of coups.

West Africa’s latest “copycat” coup attempt was condemned by the African Union, European Union and Ecowas. Yet it was praised by pro-Russian social media accounts, reflecting a growing cleavage between the Russia-aligned juntas of the Sahel Alliance and the remaining Ecowas-aligned civilian regimes of west Africa.

Although Nigeria-led Ecowas threatened military intervention after the coup in Niger in July 2023, the regional body only actually militarily intervened to defeat the coup attempt in Benin. Nigeria, it appears, has drawn a line in the sand to retain a buffer from further instability – including JNIM operations. On the same day of the coup attempt in Benin, it was reported that Nigeria was seeking greater aid from France to combat insecurity.

John Joseph Chin is Assistant Teaching Professor of Strategy and Technology, Carnegie Mellon University

@The Conversation