Nigeria’s leading opposition figures have formed a coalition in a bid to defeat President Bola Tinubu in the 2027 general election.
Atiku Abubakar, Nigeria’s former vice president, and Peter Obi, a former state governor, will together lead the African Democratic Congress. The men finished in second and third places respectively in the last presidential election, which Tinubu won with 37% of the votes. Obi was also Abubakar’s running mate on a ticket that lost to Tinubu’s predecessor in 2019.
The ADC coalition includes many former Tinubu allies — most notably Nasir El Rufai, the former governor of the populous northern Kaduna state — and hopes to emulate the success of Tinubu’s All Progressives Congress, which was formed by an alliance of opposition politicians (including Abubakar) in 2013 and engineered the first-ever defeat of an incumbent Nigerian president two years later.