• D.C.
  • BXL
  • Lagos
  • Riyadh
  • Beijing
  • SG
  • D.C.
  • BXL
  • Lagos
Semafor Logo
  • Riyadh
  • Beijing
  • SG


Nigerian opposition leaders form coalition against Tinubu

Jul 4, 2025, 8:35am EDT
PostEmailWhatsapp
Peter Obi.
Peter Obi. Patrick Meinhardt/Getty Images.

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.

AD
AD