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Guinea’s government has dissolved 40 political parties, including the country’s three main opposition groups, in a move critics say marks the final step towards a one-party state under President Mamady Doumbouya.

The Ministry of Territorial Administration and Decentralisation issued the decree late on Friday, citing the parties’ failure to meet their legal obligations.

Beyond stripping them of their legal status, the order froze their assets and banned the use of their names, logos and emblems, with a government-appointed curator assigned to oversee the transfer of their holdings.

The three most prominent parties dissolved are the Union of Democratic Forces of Guinea (UFDG), the Rally of the Guinean People (RPG) – the party of ousted former President Alpha Condé – and the Union of Republican Forces (UFR).

All three had already been suspended last August, weeks before a constitutional referendum that cleared the way for Doumbouya to stand in December’s presidential election.

UFDG leader Cellou Dalein Diallo, speaking from exile, accused Doumbouya of dismantling democratic life to entrench his grip on power. In a video posted to Facebook on Sunday, he said the dissolution was part of a deliberate drive to build a “party-state” and urged supporters to “rise as one” against a government that had lasted “far too long”.

He said that dialogue and legal routes had been exhausted, while his party’s communications coordinator went further, describing the decree as “the final act of a true political farce” aimed at cementing single-party rule.

Ibrahima Diallo, a leader in the pro-democracy National Front for the Defence of the Constitution, said the move had “formalised a dictatorship” and warned that Guinea was sinking into “profound uncertainty”.

The crackdown is the latest in a sustained campaign against dissent under Doumbouya, who seized power in a 2021 coup before winning a presidential election in December, a vote from which all major opposition figures were barred.

Since taking power, his government has shut down media outlets, banned protests and arrested or driven into exile scores of opposition figures and civil society activists.

Several relatives of prominent dissidents have also been abducted, and two well-known pro-democracy activists have been missing since July 2024.

Wave of coups

A wave of coups has brought military leaders to power in Africa, across a belt stretching from the Atlantic through the Sahel region to the Red Sea since 2020, while an attempted coup in Benin failed in late 2025.

The development has led to what analysts have described as a “coup belt“.

Madagascar’s and Guinea-Bissau’s armies most recently removed civilian leaders in their respective countries from power in late 2025, underscoring growing discontent with elected governments.

Although often carried out with popular backing, the military takeovers have also seen civil liberties clawed back.

Thousands of demonstrators have taken to the streets around the world to mark International Women’s Day, taking a stand on a number of issues including the US-Israeli war on Iran and gender-based violence.

In Spain, where the government drew the ire of the United States for refusing to allow it to use Spain’s military bases for strikes against Iran, thousands of women took to the streets of major cities to call for an end to the war.

“It is within our power to stop the war, to stop the barbarity, and to win rights,” said Yolanda Diaz, Spain’s second deputy prime minister. “We proclaim ourselves in defence of peace, in defence of the Iranian people, in defence of Iranian women.”

On the first day of the joint US-Israeli war on Iran, strikes on a primary school in the city of Minab killed 165 girls, most between the ages of seven and 12, during class hours – the deadliest single attack on civilians so far.

In France, where more than 150 demonstrations were held, 73-year-old rape survivor Gisele Pelicot led a march calling for an end to sexual violence, telling a crowd in Paris, “We won’t give up”.

Pelicot became a global symbol in the fight against sexual violence after she waived her right to anonymity during the 2024 trial of her ex-husband and dozens of strangers who raped her while she was unconscious.

Across the Atlantic, activists gathered at Zorro Ranch in the US town of Albuquerque, New Mexico, where the late convicted sex offender Jeffrey Epstein is alleged to have sexually abused and trafficked underage girls and young women.

“The years-long cover-up and protection of Jeffrey Epstein’s allies and co-conspirators exposed a culture of impunity that tells survivors their pain is negotiable when powerful men are involved,” said Rachel O’Leary Carmona, executive director of Women’s March.

In New York, protesters gathered outside Trump Tower for a “Believe Survivors” demonstration after this week’s publication of FBI documents by the US Justice Department describing interviews with a woman who alleged President Donald Trump sexually assaulted her when she was a minor.

In Puyo, an Amazonian town in Ecuador, members of various Indigenous groups gathered to raise their voices about the degradation of the environment, and oil and gas expansion. “We want to live in a healthy environment and in harmony with the forest, so we are asking for respect and that public policies for nature are put in place,” said Ruth Penafiel, 59, from the Kichwa community in the northern Amazon.

In Brazil, Sunday’s marches channeled outrage over the alleged gang rape of a 17-year-old girl in Rio de Janeiro’s Copacabana neighbourhood in January. The case gained national attention this week when four suspects handed themselves over to authorities.

In Pakistan’s capital, Islamabad, police briefly detained several women’s rights activists attempting to hold a rally in defiance of a government ban on public gatherings imposed amid a surge in militant violence in the country. Aurat March, a network of women’s rights activists, condemned the crackdown, saying participants had been peacefully exercising their right to protest.

Women’s rights activists shouted slogans during a protest in Istanbul, Turkiye. In China and Russia, vendors sold flowers wrapped in pink. And in Phnom Penh, Cambodia, local workers lifted fists and umbrellas as they celebrated.