Government and politics

Officially, the politics of Sudan takes place in the framework of a federal presidential representative democratic republic, where the President of Sudan is head of state, head of government and commander-in-chief of the Sudan People's Armed Forces in a multi-party system. Legislative power is vested in both the government and the bicameral parliament — the National Legislature, with its National Assembly (lower chamber) and the Council of States (upper chamber). The judiciary is independent and obtained by the Constitutional Court

However, following the Second Sudanese Civil War (1983–2005) and the now-low-scale war in Darfur, Sudan is widely recognized as an authoritarian state where all effective political power is obtained by President Omar al-Bashir and the ruling National Congress Party (NCP).

In 1993, Sudan was transformed into an Islamic authoritarian single-party state as al-Bashir abolished the Revolutionary Command Council and created the National Islamic Front (NIF) with a new parliament and government obtained solely by members of the NIF. At the same time, the structure of regional administration was replaced by the creation of twenty-six states, each headed by a governor, thus making Sudan a federal republic.Executive posts are divided between the NCP, the SPLA, the Sudanese Eastern Front and factions of the Umma Party and Democratic Unionist Party (DUP).

According to the new 2005 constitution, the bicameral National Legislature is the official Sudanese parliament and is divided between two chambers — the National Assembly, a lower house with 450 seats, and the Council of States, an upper house with 50 seats. Thus the parliament consists of 500 appointed members altogether, where all are indirectly elected by state legislatures to serve six-year terms.

 Despite his international arrest warrant, al-Bashir was a candidate in the 2010 Sudanese presidential election, the first democratic election with multiple political parties participating in twenty-four years.In the build-up to the vote, Sudanese pro-democracy activists say they faced intimidation by the government  and the International Crisis Group reported that the ruling party had gerrymandered electoral districts. A few days before the vote, the main opposition candidate, Yasir Arman from the SPLM, withdrew from the race.[60] The U.S.-based Carter Center, which helped monitor the elections, described the vote tabulation process as "highly chaotic, non-transparent and vulnerable to electoral manipulation." Al-Bashir was declared the winner of the election with sixty-eight percent of the vote.