APC, PDP and LP Gear Up for 2027: Strategies, Alliances and Primaries

With the 2027 general elections still over a year away, Nigeria's major political parties — the All Progressives Congress (APC), Peoples Democratic Party (PDP), and Labour Party (LP) — are already deep in strategic positioning. Party conventions, internal primaries, and cross-party negotiations are increasingly dominating political conversations in Abuja and state capitals.

To follow that positioning properly, it helps to know what the parties are actually competing for at this stage — because most of what happens now is not about persuading voters. It is about controlling the machinery that selects candidates.

The Real Prize Is Candidate Selection

In Nigerian elections, the decisive contest is often the primary rather than the general election. Whoever controls a party's structure in a state or ward usually has influence over who emerges as its candidate. And in constituencies where one party is dominant, winning the primary is close to winning the seat.

That is why early manoeuvring concentrates on party structures — ward and local government executives, state chairmen, and delegate lists — rather than on public messaging.

How Primaries Work

Parties choose candidates in one of two ways, and the choice is itself a political instrument:

• Indirect primaries — elected delegates cast the votes. The candidate who can line up the most delegates wins. This rewards control of party structures and relationships with governors and local leaders.
• Direct primaries — all registered party members in a constituency vote. This rewards name recognition and popular appeal, and is harder for a small group to control.

The same party may use different methods for different races. When a party changes method shortly before a primary, it is usually a signal about which candidate it prefers.

What Each Party Is Managing

The APC faces the challenge of managing internal factions while presenting a united front ahead of the elections. President Tinubu's allies are working to consolidate support across the party's governors and National Working Committee, while opposition voices within the party continue to make noise. For a governing party, the difficulty is rarely building a base — it is keeping the ambitions inside it in some kind of order.

The PDP, still regrouping from its 2023 losses, is attempting to rebuild its national structure. The party's National Executive Committee has announced plans for a reconciliation forum aimed at bringing together aggrieved members and former governors who left ahead of 2023. Rebuilding a national structure means persuading people who walked away, and that is a negotiation rather than an announcement.

The Labour Party, which made a surprising showing in 2023 under Peter Obi's banner, is working to institutionalise its grassroots support and expand beyond its South-East stronghold. The party is reportedly in talks with several prominent Northern politicians to broaden its national appeal. Labour's difficulty is structural: it demonstrated appeal without having spent decades building the ward-level machinery the older parties already own.

The Framework Every Party Works Within

Whatever happens inside the parties, the sequence is fixed from outside:

• Candidates must be selected through primaries that the party notifies and conducts
• Nomination lists must be filed before the window closes, and INEC publishes them
• Campaigning is confined to a defined period and must stop 24 hours before polling opens
• Disputes over candidate selection are argued in the courts, often under severe time pressure

That last point catches parties out almost every cycle. Primaries that are rushed or manipulated at the last minute are frequently decided by judges rather than by delegates.

What to Watch

Political analysts say the next 12 months will be decisive in shaping the electoral landscape for 2027, with potential mega-alliances and candidate declarations expected before year-end. Three things are worth tracking:

• The primary method each party selects, and whether it changes late in the process
• Defection patterns, which reveal which party's structure is seen as the winning one
• Whether alliances rest on shared positions or shared arithmetic. Mergers driven only by electoral maths tend to fracture once nominations are awarded

Watch Nigeria Elections reports on primaries, nominations and candidate declarations as they happen. Our coverage is non-partisan: we report what the parties do, not what we think they should do.