Madar (Yaoundé) - Tiriane Balbine Noah was elected president of the Cameroon Renaissance Movement (MRC), one of the country's main opposition parties, on Saturday, October 17, 2026, succeeding founder Maurice Kamto at an extraordinary convention, Cameroonian media reported.
She won 1,286 votes, with 11 spoilt ballots, according to the news site 237online, or nearly 97% of votes cast according to Actu Cameroun, which said her rival Pierre Emmanuel Binyam had withdrawn mid-week. The new leader named her team, with lawyer Emmanuel Simh as first vice-president and lawyer Ndong Christopher Mveh as secretary general.
Noah, the party's second vice-president since 2018, had been acting leader since Kamto resigned on September 8, followed the same day by first vice-president Mamadou Mota, Camer.be reported. She had already led the party on an interim basis in 2019, when Kamto, Mota and dozens of party officials were jailed after post-election protests.
According to Camer.be, the resignations followed a refusal by the Ministry of Territorial Administration, in a letter dated August 19, 2026, to recognise the December 2025 party convention that re-elected Kamto and the bodies it created, a stance that threatened the party's participation in upcoming elections.
The first woman to lead the MRC since its founding in 2012, Noah pledged to remobilise supporters, strengthen internal unity and win seats in the 2027 legislative and municipal elections, Actu Cameroun reported. The party's boycott of the 2020 local elections had left it unable to field a candidate in the 2025 presidential election.
