2018 Democratic Republic of the Congo general election

General elections were held in the Democratic Republic of the Congo on 30 December 2018 to determine a successor to outgoing president Joseph Kabila, as well as for the 500 seats of the National Assembly and the 715 elected seats of the 26 provincial assemblies. Félix Tshisekedi of the Union for Democracy and Social Progress won the presidency with 38.6% of the vote, defeating Martin Fayulu of the Dynamic of the Opposition and independent candidate Emmanuel Ramazani Shadary. Fayulu alleged that the vote was rigged against him by Tshisekedi and Kabila, challenging the result in the Constitutional Court. Election observers, including the Catholic Church, also cast doubt on the official result. Nonetheless, on 20 January the Court declared Tshisekedi the winner. Parties supporting Kabila won the majority of seats in the National Assembly. Tshisekedi was sworn in as the fifth president of the Democratic Republic of the Congo on 24 January 2019, the first peaceful transition of power in the country since its independence from Belgium in 1960.

According to the constitution, the second and final term of President Kabila expired on 20 December 2016. General elections were originally scheduled for 27 November 2016, but were delayed with a promise to hold them by the end of 2017. This promise was subsequently broken, but after both international and internal pressure the elections were finally scheduled for 23 December 2018. They were, however, postponed for a week on 30 December 2018 due to a fire in the electoral commission's warehouse in Kinshasa destroying 8,000 electronic voting machines.

Incumbent President Kabila was constitutionally ineligible for a third term. He and his party, the People's Party for Reconstruction and Democracy, supported the candidacy of Emmanuel Ramazani Shadary, the former Minister of the Interior, who formally ran as an independent candidate. In opposition to Shadary's candidacy, seven opposition leaders, including Jean-Pierre Bemba and Moïse Katumbi, nominated Martin Fayulu as their candidate for president. However, Félix Tshisekedi and Vital Kamerhe soon after broke this agreement and agreed that Tshisekedi should run for president while Kamerhe would serve as his campaign manager and become prime minister if he won. They also agreed that Tshisekedi and his party will back a candidate from Kamerhe's Union for the Congolese Nation in the 2023 general election.

Preliminary results were scheduled to be announced on 6 January 2019, with the final result on 15 January and the inauguration of the next president on 18 January. However, it was later announced on 5 January that the publication of preliminary results would be delayed, as less than half of the votes have been obtained by the electoral commission. On 10 January the commission declared Félix Tshisekedi, leader of the Union for Democracy and Social Progress opposition party, the winner of the election. Martin Fayulu, who came in second, has claimed that the election was rigged and that he will challenge the result in the DRC's Constitutional Court. The country's influential Roman Catholic Church, which deployed 40,000 election monitors, has also said the official result does not align with its observations, which place Fayulu as the winner. On 12 January it became known that parties supporting Joseph Kabila won the majority of seats in the National Assembly. The Constitutional Court announced on 14 January that it would review Fayulu's appeal of the result, and would make a ruling on 19 January. That day, the Constitutional Court rejected Fayulu's challenge of the election results and upheld Tshisekedi's victory. Fayulu claimed to be the "legitimate" president and called for protests.

While Tshisekedi had won the election, parties aligned with Kabila secured a majority in the National Assembly and later in the Senate during the March 2019 Senate election. Because of this Tshisekedi's ability to implement policies or appoint a new Prime Minister were limited, and while negotiations have been ongoing to form a new government the President has been working with the former cabinet of Kabila. It was not until 20 May 2019 that he appointed Kabila ally and career bureaucrat Sylvestre Ilunga as his designate for prime minister. The parliamentary majority faction and President Tshisekedi came to an agreement on forming a new government by 27 July 2019, choosing the 65 members of the new cabinet. Out of those, 42 posts went to the Kabila-aligned Common Front for Congo candidates, while 23 went to the Heading for Change coalition (Tshisekedi's alliance). The new Ilunga government formally took office in late August 2019.