Cape Verde

Cape Verde (Cabo Verde) is an Atlantic archipelago of ten islands off West Africa, home to roughly 550,000 people and widely regarded as one of the continent’s most stable democracies. A former Portuguese colony, independent since 1975 and lusophone, with its capital at Praia and the Cape Verdean escudo as its currency, it has a long tradition of peaceful alternation in power between its two main parties. That tradition was on display again in May 2026: in parliamentary elections on 17 May, the opposition African Party for the Independence of Cape Verde (PAICV) won according to reported results, unseating the Movement for Democracy (MpD), which had governed since 2016. PAICV leader Francisco Carvalho, the mayor of Praia, emerged as the expected next prime minister, while the long-serving prime minister Ulisses Correia e Silva conceded defeat; as of the last verified reports in late May 2026, the new government had not yet been sworn in. The president, José Maria Neves, is also of the PAICV, and a presidential election is scheduled for November 2026. International coverage treated the orderly handover as a further sign of the country’s democratic maturity.

Cape Verde’s press-freedom record is among the strongest in Africa. The country ranks 40th of 180 in the RSF 2026 World Press Freedom Index, in the “satisfactory” band and among the higher-ranked Lusophone states, with press freedom guaranteed by the constitution. Reporters Without Borders nonetheless notes persistent political influence over the state-owned media, which remain highly influential and are major employers in the media sector; formal appointment structures differ, however, with RTC using an Independent Council since its 2019 reform while Inforpress remains more directly controlled through the state-shareholder framework. The media regulator is the Autoridade Reguladora para a Comunicação Social (ARC), which during 2025 intervened in state-media governance: it found that the RTC board had illegally interfered in TCV’s editorial sphere and later imposed a fine of 350,000 escudos in the related administrative-offence process. National policy has prioritised digital modernisation of the public media, but no sector-specific rules on AI-generated or synthetic news content were identified.

Cape Verde’s state-owned media in this dataset comprise two organisations with two different typologies — one Captured Public/State-Managed, the other State Controlled. The Radiotelevisão Caboverdiana (RTC), the national public-service broadcaster created in 1997 and operating the television channel TCV and the radio station RCV, is classified Captured Public/State-Managed (CaPu): since a 2019 statutory reform its board has been selected by an arms-length Independent Council, giving it genuine public-service structures, but those safeguards are compromised in practice: in 2025 the regulator confirmed and fined board interference in TCV’s editorial content, and the journalists’ union and the International Federation of Journalists condemned the suspension of TCV’s director. Inforpress, the national news agency, is classified State Controlled (SC): organised as a company in which the State is the sole shareholder and, in recent years, managed by an administrator appointed and removable through the state-shareholder framework, it lacks RTC’s arms-length appointment mechanism, a directness of control underlined when the government removed its administrator in 2023. Both outlets entered the SMM dataset in 2024.

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