When the consultations convened in Addis Ababa in early June 2026, they carried the formal weight of Quintet sponsorship: the African Union, the United Nations, the European Union, IGAD, and the Arab League assembled to facilitate what was billed as a Sudanese – Sudanese dialogue. The process was meant to be preparatory, an agreed-upon design phase in which civilian and political actors would lay the groundwork for a broader, more structured negotiation. What followed instead was a breakdown, one that was not incidental but procedurally induced, and whose origins trace back through the AU’s institutional conduct to the biographical profile of the man now leading it.

The breakdown has a specific, documented cause. Ahead of the Addis Ababa consultations, a preparatory process under IGAD auspices, including engagements in Djibouti, sought to organize the Sudanese political landscape into three primary formations: the Sumoud Alliance, the Democratic Bloc, and the Tasis Coalition. However, the specific seat allocations and participant lists established during these preliminaries remained deeply contested. On the eve of the June 2026 talks, the African Union, IGAD, and the Arab League raised formal objections regarding the delegate counts, while several factions boycotted the sessions, claiming the three-bloc formula unfairly marginalized other critical political actors.

The Democratic Bloc, whose leadership council consists of nineteen seats, was allocated twelve seats and requested permission to finance the participation of its remaining seven representatives through its own logistical arrangements.

What followed made the seat question moot in a deeper sense. According to participants involved in the preparatory process, the AU proceeded to grant sixteen seats to the National Forces Coordination, a formation led by Mohamed Sayed Ahmed Al-Jakoumi, without consulting any of the other participating groups and with no procedural basis in the Djibouti understandings. Al-Jakoumi is not a peripheral figure. He has publicly stated that the solution to Sudan’s conflict lies in resolving it militarily through popular support for the Sudanese Armed Forces, a position that places his formation firmly in the pro-SAF camp. The unilateral expansion of his delegation’s presence, at roughly parity with the Sumoud and Democratic Bloc delegations, fundamentally altered the balance of the room before any discussion had begun. To many participants, this was not merely an administrative adjustment but a political intervention that fundamentally altered the balance of representation within the process.

Fourteen political groups and leaders within the Democratic Bloc, including the Democratic Unionist Party (Original), the Justice and Equality Movement, and the Beja Council, announced they would boycott the meetings. In a joint statement, they criticized the procedural arrangements and accused the Quintet mechanism of determining the agenda and participants without sufficient consultation with Sudanese stakeholders. Key components of the Forces of Freedom and Change’s Democratic Bloc boycotted the consultations in protest against the approach proposed by the international quintet. The consultations produced not a unified outcome but two separate, competing statements from different groups, with the consultations failing to produce an agreed-upon joint document.

The failure, however, cannot be analyzed as a process malfunction in isolation. It has to be placed in the institutional context of who is now leading the African Union Commission and what that leadership represents.

Mahmoud Ali Youssouf served from 1997 to 2001 as Djibouti’s plenipotentiary and Extraordinary Ambassador to Egypt and Permanent Representative to the Arab League, simultaneously holding non-resident accreditation to Sudan, Lebanon, Syria, and Turkey. He then served as Minister Delegate for International Cooperation before becoming Foreign Minister in 2005, a post he held for two decades. He has also served as Chairperson of the Council of Ministers of both the Arab League and the Organization of Islamic Cooperation. His entire diplomatic formation was deeply embedded in Arab institutional networks and included longstanding engagement with Egypt and the Arab League.

That relationship did not sit passively in the background of his election. Egyptian President Abdel Fattah al-Sisi publicly endorsed Youssouf’s candidacy ahead of the February 2025 AU elections, with the endorsement announced just days after Kenyan President William Ruto visited Cairo to lobby for rival candidate Raila Odinga. States allied with Egypt, including Gulf states and Francophone countries aligned with France, mobilized resources to secure Youssouf’s election. His Muslim identity and strategic ties with North African nations secured crucial votes from that bloc. Egypt’s strong support for Youssouf reflected the strategic significance Cairo attached to the outcome of the election. Cairo has consistently backed the SAF, views the RSF as a security threat, and has a direct interest in seeing a military-aligned administration consolidate power in Khartoum, calculations driven by the Grand Ethiopian Renaissance Dam dispute, Nile water rights, and Red Sea strategic positioning.

The institutional consequences of that investment became visible almost immediately. AUC Chair Youssouf publicly endorsed the Port Sudan peace initiative, a process led by the SAF-aligned administration, a move that openly contradicted the AU’s own norms on Unconstitutional Changes of Government (UCG), thereby weakening the credibility of Sudan’s suspension. Sudanese civil society reacted sharply, interpreting the endorsement as evidence of bias, and the institutional inconsistency created space for diplomatic maneuvering around established norms at precisely the moment when clarity was most needed.

Djibouti’s own strategic interests may help explain why AU positions have appeared increasingly compatible with Egyptian preferences. As a state whose diplomatic relevance is tied to Red Sea stability, Arab partnerships, and its role as a host of regional institutions, Djibouti has strong incentives to maintain close coordination with Cairo. This does not necessarily imply direct Egyptian influence over AU decision-making. Rather, it suggests a convergence of interests in which Djiboutian and Egyptian preferences on Sudan increasingly overlap.

The AU representative to Sudan, Mohamed Belaiche, was also criticized during the Addis Ababa week for a lack of neutrality, though the more fundamental critique was directed not at any individual envoy but at the institutional behavior of the Commission as a whole.

Investigative complaints from Sudanese civilian groups, including the Sudan Founding Alliance (Ta’sis), extended this concern further, pointing to what they described as a major security anomaly in late 2025: the inclusion in AU delegations of figures associated with the former Islamist-backed Bashir regime, including Yusuf Ahmed Al-Tayeb Al-Kordofani, a former ambassador under the dissolved government. For critics, such selections signaled not only procedural opacity but also a quiet reintegration of elements linked to the old regime into transitional political spaces, raising further questions about the Commission’s screening criteria and neutrality.

What makes the current moment structurally significant is the nature of the drift taking place. When the African Union was redesigned from the OAU’s secretariat model in 2002, the architects of the institution made a deliberate choice to embed a normative framework, most notably an explicit zero-tolerance principle for UCG. Following General Burhan’s October 2021 military coup, the AU applied that framework by suspending Sudan from all AU activities. The principle was clear. What critics now allege is that under Youssouf’s leadership, the Commission has moved from enforcing that principle to quietly circumventing it, not by lifting Sudan’s suspension formally, but by running a political process that treats the Port Sudan military junta as a de facto sovereign interlocutor and that has now inserted a strongly pro-SAF formation into civilian dialogue, unilaterally and without procedural justification, through the mechanism of seat allocation.

The result is an institution that has migrated from venue-provider to outcome-shaper, and done so without acknowledging the migration. That is the more insidious form of bias, not the kind that announces itself but the kind that operates through procedural choices, administrative decisions, and the quiet redistribution of presence at a table.

The Addis Ababa talks have not collapsed entirely. Indirect meetings with civilian and democratic bloc formations are continuing, and a July follow-up round remains under discussion. Sumoud, portions of the Democratic Bloc, and other signatories have produced a joint vision document calling for a civilian-led preparatory phase and an inclusive political settlement.

The political will among Sudan’s civilian and democratic forces has not evaporated. What is being tested is whether the international architecture around them is capable of serving that will, or whether it has already been captured by interests that have a very different outcome in mind. Based on the experience of Addis Ababa, that question remains unanswered, but increasingly difficult to ignore.

By Surafel Tesfaye and Tsega’ab Amare, Researchers, Horn Review