The Morning Liberia Chose Again: Ellen Johnson Sirleaf and the 2005 Election

Before Ellen Johnson Sirleaf became Africa’s first elected woman president, Liberians stood in long lines to decide what peace might look like after war. The 2005 election was not one woman’s triumph alone, but a country’s difficult return to choice.

Before sunrise, the queues had already begun. At polling places around Monrovia, people waited through heat, delay and the slow work of a complicated ballot. Some women carried babies on their backs. Many voters stood for hours because, after years in which guns had decided too much, a marked paper carried an unusual weight.

The world would remember the winner: Ellen Johnson Sirleaf, the woman who became Africa’s first democratically elected female head of state. Liberia’s 2005 election, however, was larger than a single name. It was a country testing whether choice could survive the memory of war.

A ballot after fourteen years of war

Liberia entered the election carrying the damage of two civil wars and roughly fourteen years of conflict. The 2003 peace agreement had ended Charles Taylor’s rule and created a transitional government, but peace on paper could not rebuild homes, schools, courts or trust by itself.

United Nations peacekeepers helped secure the country, disarm fighters and support the election. More than 1.3 million people registered to vote. That number mattered not as an international achievement alone, but as evidence that Liberians were willing to place hope in a civic process whose institutions were still fragile.

The country had known elections before, including the 1997 vote that brought Taylor to power. In 2005, the question was not simply whether people could vote. It was whether institutions, candidates and armed constituencies could accept a result without pulling Liberia backward.

Twenty-two candidates, no easy answer

The first round on 11 October offered twenty-two presidential candidates. George Weah, the football star whose fame crossed class and national borders, finished first. Sirleaf, an economist and former finance minister who had known prison and exile, finished second. Neither won a majority, so the country moved toward a runoff.

Their contest was more complicated than celebrity versus experience. Weah drew powerful support from young people and communities frustrated with an older political class. Sirleaf assembled a broader second-round coalition and argued that her experience could help rebuild a state whose systems had been hollowed out.

To turn either man or woman into a simple symbol is to miss what voters faced. They were choosing among different kinds of promise while living with unemployment, displacement, damaged roads and the unfinished return of former combatants to civilian life.

Women had already changed the meaning of peace

Long before the runoff, Liberian women had made themselves impossible to ignore. Women’s peace activism—associated most visibly with Leymah Gbowee and the Women of Liberia Mass Action for Peace—pressed armed men toward negotiation and insisted that ordinary life mattered more than the pride of commanders.

That movement should not be reduced to a campaign machine for Sirleaf. Liberian women did not speak with one political voice, and the peace movement’s achievement belonged to a broad coalition. Yet its public courage changed the field on which the election occurred: women were not merely victims to be protected, but organisers, voters and political actors.

Sirleaf’s candidacy entered that transformed space. Her victory would be historic, but history had been prepared by women whose names were known and unknown, in meeting halls, markets, churches, mosques and streets.

The runoff and the argument that followed

Liberians voted again on 8 November. Official results gave Sirleaf and running mate Joseph Boakai 478,526 votes—59.4 percent of valid ballots—against 327,046 for Weah and Rudolph Johnson. Sirleaf carried ten of Liberia’s fifteen counties, including populous Montserrado, Nimba and Bong.

The result did not arrive without dispute. Weah’s Congress for Democratic Change alleged fraud and pursued a complaint before the National Elections Commission. Hearings continued for weeks before the commission concluded that the evidence did not substantiate the claim.

The complaint belongs in the story because democracy is not made credible by pretending disagreement never happened. What mattered was that the dispute moved through a public legal process rather than becoming a return to nationwide war.

A first that did not erase the work ahead

Sirleaf took office on 16 January 2006. The image travelled quickly: an African woman standing at the centre of a presidential inauguration. It cracked a political ceiling, but it did not repair a power grid, restore a school or reconcile a divided community by itself.

Her government inherited destroyed infrastructure, weak public institutions, poverty and deep mistrust. It also inherited the expectations carried by a historic victory. To celebrate the first without examining the burden would turn history into a poster.

Sirleaf’s later record would invite praise and criticism, including debates over corruption, inequality, reconciliation and the reach of postwar reform. A serious account can hold both things at once: the election was a landmark, and landmarks do not end the road.

What Liberians chose

It is tempting to tell the Liberia 2005 election as the rise of one extraordinary woman. The fuller story belongs to the people who registered, queued, counted, observed, challenged and finally accepted a constitutional transfer of authority.

BrytaAfrica’s Ellen Johnson Sirleaf story follows the woman behind the office, while Liberia: Born Free, Still Becoming places the election inside a country whose freedom has always carried difficult questions. The short Sirleaf highlight offers another doorway into her journey from prison and exile to the presidency.

Carry the story beyond election day

Election night is where many histories stop. Liberia’s did not. Download BrytaAfrica to continue through the people, peace movements and hard choices that came before and after the ballots—and to carry the next African story with you.

Sources and further reading

The Carter Center and National Democratic Institute, Final Report on the 2005 Liberia Elections (2007).

United Nations Secretary-General, statement on the Liberian presidential election results, 23 November 2005.

Ernest Harsch, “Liberian woman breaks the ‘glass ceiling’,” UN Africa Renewal, January 2006.

Nobel Prize Outreach, “Ellen Johnson Sirleaf – Facts,” NobelPrize.org.