Romuald Wadagni, Benin’s finance minister and a Harvard-trained accountant, won a landslide victory in Sunday’s presidential election, according to provisional results released on Monday. He will replace President Patrice Talon, who was not able to run again after serving two five-year terms.
Mr. Wadagni, who once worked as an auditor in Boston for the accounting firm Deloitte, secured 94 percent of the vote. The results were released hours after his only challenger, Paul Hounkpe, conceded. But his main rival, Renaud Agbodjo, had been barred from running because his party did not have any seats in Parliament.
“The election of a young leader is a strong signal for the renewal of the political class and the opening of new perspectives for governance,” said Anicette Bada Labitan, a supporter of Mr. Wadagni who hailed his choice of a woman, Mariam Chabi Talata, to be his running mate. “This clearly reflects an evolution in mind-sets and a willingness to entrust significant responsibilities to a generation that is closer to current realities.”
At 49, Mr. Wadagni joins a small pool of younger presidents on a young continent primarily run by aging presidents, many of whom have won in over a dozen recent elections. The elections that voted in the long-term presidents, which were widely viewed to be unfair, followed deadly revolts led by young people tired of high unemployment and leaders they saw as out of touch.
While most of the continent’s other younger leaders took power through coups, Mr. Wadagni emerged from a succession plan carefully managed by Mr. Talon. He now faces the challenges of confronting a growing jihadist insurgency and sustaining an upward economic trajectory that he helped build, analysts say.
“The economy has progressed a bit. We don’t deny that, but we blame this government for many things because democracy no longer exists practically in Benin,” said Prosper Adoukonou, a retired tax collector who voted for the opposition. “The security situation in Benin is really worrying.”
Organizations that observed the voting polls, including the Economic Community of West African States, or ECOWAS, a regional alliance, said the election in Benin was peaceful and orderly. But only 58 percent of eligible voters turned out.
And the election almost did not take place.
In December, disgruntled members of the military attempted a coup, temporarily seizing a state television station and attacking the presidency before airstrikes by ECOWAS troops repelled them. As justification for the coup attempt, the soldiers cited worsening security in northern Benin because of jihadist terrorism.
But analysts say the surge in jihadist violence in northern Benin is a spillover from the country’s neighbors in the Sahel, a vast area of land south of the Sahara where military juntas seized power in several countries and vowed to crush their insurgencies — just as the Benin military rebels did last year. Instead, the Sahel has turned into the world’s deadliest terrorism hot spot.
“The challenge of deteriorating security was indeed on the agenda in the election,” said Héni Nsaibia, a senior West Africa analyst at Armed Conflict Location & Event Data, a research group in Wisconsin.
“The vote comes after the country experienced its deadliest year of conflict on record in 2025, with an attempted coup in December highlighting underlying political fragilities at a critical moment for the country,” he added.
Mr. Talon, the departing president, has been accused of ruling with an iron fist. He arrested and prosecuted several opposition figures, and in 2019, the main opposition party boycotted the parliamentary election after he changed the electoral code. In a parliamentary election in January, his party swept all 190 seats.
Still, with what will now be the fifth peaceful transfer of power since its independence, Benin stands out as one of the few relatively stable democracies in West Africa, a region plagued by coups.
Out of over a dozen elections in Africa since January 2025, Benin’s was the only in which an incumbent stepped down because of term limits. And in all but two elections, the incumbents, most of whom were presidents who had been in power for decades, were re-elected after protests that killed hundreds of young people.
Just last week, Djibouti’s 78-year-old president, Ismail Omar Guelleh, won a sixth term, with 97.8 percent of the vote.
Mr. Wadagni’s career is markedly different from those of Africa’s other younger leaders, most of whom seized power through force. Having been the finance minister during Mr. Talon’s 10-year presidential run, he is a “highly technical insider” who is largely credited for the economic success of the outgoing government, said Beverly Ochieng, a senior analyst at Control Risks, a global risk consultancy. His relative youth and technocratic background could help him connect with frustrated young people, she added.
“There was a coup and years of repression,” she said. “His presidency is one way of bridging with younger people so that they are not co-opted by extremists.”
Flore Nobime contributed reporting from Benin.
Saikou Jammeh is a reporter and researcher for The Times based in Dakar, Senegal.
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