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As the country navigates deep economic strain, rising disillusionment, youth-led dissent, and elite-driven political realignments, political parties have become both indispensable and deeply distrusted. The irony is stark: parties remain central to governance, yet are increasingly hollowed out of their representative purpose.
Political parties are meant to be the heartbeat of democracy. In theory, they aggregate citizens’ interests, offer clear policy choices, recruit leaders, and hold governments accountable. In practice, however, Kenya’s contemporary politics reveals a widening gap between what parties are designed to do and what they increasingly do instead.
This is why the turmoil within ODM, long regarded as the only party that has, for two decades, consistently aggregated and articulated citizens’ interests, has unsettled many Kenyans. As the country navigates deep economic strain, rising disillusionment, youth-led dissent, and elite-driven political realignments, political parties have become both indispensable and deeply distrusted. The irony is stark: parties remain central to governance, yet are increasingly hollowed out of their representative purpose.
At their best, political parties simplify complexity. Kenya is a deeply plural society: divided by class, ethnicity, ideology, religion, and identity. The more than 80 political parties that contested the last election exist, in principle, to organise these differences into coherent platforms, allowing citizens to make informed electoral choices rather than face a chaotic free-for-all of individual ambition.
It is precisely for this reason that ODM’s internal struggles should concern Kenyans. It remains the single most consequential party to have organised Kenya’s socioeconomic and political diversity into a broad national coalition, bringing together citizens from vastly different backgrounds. Raila Odinga embodied that coherence. The divergent voices within ODM owe it to that legacy to preserve the ethos that has long been the party’s soul.
Political scholars have consistently warned that democracy without strong political parties risks fragmentation, weak accountability, and incoherent policymaking. In Kenya, this logic still holds. Parties such as ODM, Jubilee, UDA, DP and newer formations have historically served as vehicles for national mobilisation, enabling leaders to articulate programmes and contest power within recognisable institutional frameworks.
Yet Kenya’s lived political reality increasingly departs from this ideal. Parties rarely function as stable carriers of ideology or policy. Instead, they operate as temporary electoral machines—special-purpose vehicles assembled to win elections, abandoned after defeat, and reconstituted through elite bargains. Citizens vote for party symbols, only to watch those same parties dissolve into coalitions never presented to the electorate.
ODM, for instance, contested the last election under Azimio, while UDA anchored Kenya Kwanza. Today, Kenya Kwanza governs in a form that was never placed before voters, while ODM has effectively abandoned Azimio to enter an uneasy convergence of interests that weakens both governance and oversight. This pattern has become familiar: from the 2008 Grand Coalition, to the 2018 Handshake government, and now the so-called “broad-based government” that emerged after the Gen Z–led protests of 2024.
Coalitions, in themselves, are not undemocratic. In divided societies like Kenya, they can enhance inclusion, reduce conflict, and prevent exclusionary rule. But when coalitions are driven primarily by elite self-preservation rather than shared policy agendas, they corrode accountability. Citizens struggle to identify who is responsible for economic pain, policy failures, or broken promises. When former rivals govern together without a clear programme, opposition weakens, oversight blurs, and democratic choice is retroactively revised without voter consent.
This is where Kenya’s party crisis becomes a governance crisis. Political parties form governments, control legislatures, and shape public policy. When parties are ideologically thin, organisationally weak, and cohabit for elite survival, governance becomes transactional. Manifestos lose meaning, parliamentary caucuses prioritise loyalty over scrutiny, and policy coherence gives way to short-term political survival. Executive dominance grows—not because institutions are absent, but because parties fail to exercise oversight with conviction. Legitimacy erodes, not necessarily because elections are stolen, but because electoral outcomes no longer translate into the policy pathways voters were promised, while elite convergence creates an illusion of invincibility.
The Gen Z–led protests were, in part, a rebellion against this party-mediated betrayal. Young Kenyans did not mobilise through party structures; they mobilised despite them. Their grievances—over taxation, unemployment, corruption, and exclusion—cut across party lines, exposing how little contemporary parties speak to lived economic realities. This moment should have forced parties back to their foundational role: articulating social demands, aggregating interests, and translating popular anger into structured reform agendas. Instead, dissent was absorbed through elite accommodation, reinforcing the perception that parties exist more to manage protest than to represent citizens.
Comparatively, this crisis is not uniquely Kenyan. In the United States, parties remain powerful but are increasingly polarised and vulnerable to capture by populist outsiders. In Europe, traditional parties face declining membership and voter volatility, yet still anchor accountability through ideology and programme-based competition. What distinguishes Kenya is the speed with which parties mutate and the ease with which political identities are rebranded without policy reckoning. Party-hopping is normalised, coalitions are improvised, and loyalty is rewarded more than principle.
The question, then, is not whether political parties matter—they do—but what kind of parties Kenya is willing to tolerate. Parties rooted in ideas rather than personalities; in internal democracy rather than elite decree; in policy competition rather than perpetual coalition arithmetic.
If Kenyan democracy is to recover credibility, political parties must rediscover their core purpose. Being “in government” should not be treated as an achievement in itself. Serious political parties exist to represent citizens in government, not to perform power. Kenyans must see the tangible difference that governance makes in their lives. Whether in government or opposition, in coalitions or not, parties must reduce fragmentation without suffocating pluralism, compete without collapsing into opportunism, deliver rather than pontificate, and govern without erasing opposition.
Otherwise, political parties will remain what many citizens increasingly fear they have become: instruments for winning power, not vehicles for representing the people.
