Political science has a precise vocabulary for what happens when democracies change their institutional character gradually rather than abruptly. That vocabulary was developed because the most consequential democratic transitions of the past thirty years did not happen through coups. They happened through elections won legitimately, majorities deployed legally, and institutions reformed through constitutional procedures that were entirely valid on their face. The pattern has a name. The indicators can be measured. This article measures them for Mauritius across two governments and twelve years, because the evidence requires it. The academic framework's most important finding for a country like Mauritius is not that any single government is bad. It is that when executive overreach becomes a structural feature of alternating governments rather than an aberration of one, the institutional conditions that enable it require examination independently of which party happens to be in power.

An earlier version of this article presented the V-Dem Institute's 2025 democratic improvement score for Mauritius as counter-evidence to concerns about the current government's institutional trajectory. That framing was incorrect and has been removed. The lesser evil fallacy in political analysis occurs when the documented failings of a predecessor government are used to reduce the analytical weight given to concerning patterns in the successor government. The fallacy operates as follows: government A did bad things; government B replaced government A; therefore, the concerns about government B are less urgent because B is better than A. The argument is invalid. The 2024 electoral transition was a democratic achievement. The election of November 2024 demonstrated vertical accountability functioning correctly: a majority of Mauritians voted to remove a government with a documented record of institutional overreach, and the government was removed peacefully. That democratic achievement belongs to the transition. It does not immunise what follows the transition from scrutiny. The concerns about the Ramgoolam government's institutional trajectory are examined in this article on their own merits, against the same framework applied with the same rigour to the Jugnauth government's record. Both governments are measured. Neither is excused by comparison to the other.

The Bertelsmann Transformation Index 2026 Mauritius Country Report establishes the structural context within which both governments operate. Its finding is stated without qualification: "Mauritian politics is dominated by four family dynasties that alternate in power in an oligarchic manner: the Ramgoolams, linked to the Labor Party; the Jugnauths, linked to the MSM; the Berengers, linked to the MMM; and the Duvals, linked to the PMSD." The same report notes that "mainstream parties are socially anchored, with electoral bases that are predominantly ethnic," and that the Best-Loser System "perpetuate these political allegiances on ethnoreligious grounds."

The state capture literature, as applied to dynastic political systems, identifies the following structural risk: when political leadership is concentrated in a small number of families over decades, the boundary between the ruling family's interests and the state's institutional interests becomes progressively blurred. This blurring does not require corruption. It requires only that the persons occupying the institutional levers of the state have, over successive governments, developed a relationship with those levers that treats their continued operation as a family asset rather than a public trust. The BTI's oligarchy finding is not an observation about any single government's ethics. It is an observation about the structural conditions within which all Mauritian governments operate, and within which the institutional decisions examined below must be understood.

The Jugnauth government's institutional record between 2019 and 2024 is documented in detail by Freedom House, the BTI, and primary legal sources. Three episodes are directly relevant to the framework applied in this article.

The Laebens framework identifies the manipulation of electoral timing as a vertical accountability indicator. The postponement of municipal elections three times over four years, with the third postponement removing the stated legal basis of the first two, is precisely the kind of incremental institutional change the framework identifies as significant. Each postponement had a stated justification. The removal of the justification's statutory basis in the third postponement is what makes the sequence analytically relevant rather than merely administratively unfortunate.

These three episodes constitute the Jugnauth government's contribution to the pattern this article identifies. The municipal election postponements are vertical accountability events: the elected mandate of local government was extended without democratic renewal. The CP-DPP constitutional challenge is a horizontal accountability event: the constitutional independence of the prosecutorial authority was challenged by the executive's law enforcement apparatus. The social media ban is a vertical accountability event: the free flow of electoral information was restricted during an active campaign. The framework does not assess these events as evidence of a totalitarian project. It records them as the institutional overreach of a dominant party government whose ten-year tenure produced a systematic accumulation of executive convenience at the expense of institutional independence.

The historical anchor of the Ramgoolam government's side of this analysis is documented and not contested. In December 2014, the Labour-MMM electoral alliance led by Navin Ramgoolam and Paul Bérenger campaigned on a programme that included a constitutional amendment to transform Mauritius from a parliamentary democracy into a semi-presidential republic. The Freedom House 2019 country report states: "The 2014 election results were widely interpreted as a reaction to Ramgoolam's proposed constitutional reform to increase the power of the president." The Wikipedia entry on the President of Mauritius documents that the proposed reform would have conferred on the president "the power of dissolution, having a direct role in shaping foreign policy and chairing government meetings." The Alliance Lepep won 47 of 62 directly elected seats. The Second Republic proposal was rejected.

In May 2026, a committee-stage amendment to the Constitutional Review Commission Bill was tabled on behalf of Prime Minister Navin Ramgoolam. It required the future Commission to examine the creation of an Electoral College to elect the President of the Republic. The AllAfrica report of 29 May 2026 confirmed the amendment's text: the reform was stated to aim at "renforcer la légitimité et l'indépendance" of the presidential office. The Mauritius Times noted that "what might otherwise have remained a largely technical constitutional discussion has evolved into a broader debate about the distribution of state power."

The academic framework's most important contribution to this analysis is the observation that executive aggrandisement in dynastic political systems is rarely a single government's project. It is a structural tendency of systems in which political power is concentrated in a small number of families, each of which, when in government, uses its tenure to expand the institutional conveniences available to it, leaving behind precedents and statutory instruments that the next dynasty can use, build upon, or reverse as its own interests require.

The Jugnauth government postponed municipal elections three times, establishing the precedent that local democratic mandates can be extended by executive statutory amendment without judicial challenge. The 2023 amendment's removal of the epidemic condition as a statutory requirement for postponement is the relevant precedent: it established that the Local Government Act can be amended to permit postponement on no stated grounds whatsoever, with a simple parliamentary majority. A future government with a 60-0 majority has inherited that precedent.

The Jugnauth government brought a constitutional challenge to the DPP's independence through the Commissioner of Police and ICAC, establishing the procedural route through which the DPP's constitutional autonomy can be contested before the Supreme Court. The Ramgoolam government's Constitutional Review Commission is examining DPP independence through constitutional reform rather than constitutional litigation. The institutional objective, reducing the DPP's operational independence from executive influence, can be pursued through either route. The Jugnauth government used the courts. The Ramgoolam government is using constitutional reform. The direction is the same.

The analysis requires the counter-evidence to be stated with the same rigour as the concerning evidence. The institutional resilience that Mauritius retains is genuine and relevant, not as a lesser evil comparison but as a structural assessment of the constraints that remain available to citizens, civil society, and the institutions themselves.

The Privy Council in London retains jurisdiction as Mauritius's final court of appeal. This constraint is external to any Mauritian government's influence. A constitutional reform that the Supreme Court of Mauritius upholds can still be challenged before the Privy Council. The distance of the Privy Council from domestic political pressure gives it a structural independence that no internal institution can match. The coffres-forts case's permanent stay has been appealed by the DPP. That appeal will ultimately reach the Privy Council if necessary. The government cannot prevent that.

The press remains free. This article is published without restriction. The Mauritius Times, L'Express, and Le Mauricien have reported on every event documented in this article without documented government interference. The Afrobarometer 2024 survey found that 66 per cent of Mauritians support democracy in principle, with 90 per cent supporting specific democratic values. Civil society organisations have commented publicly on the constitutional reform process.

The Constitutional Review Commission's independence, while legally contingent, is substantiated by its composition. Former Chief Justice Bernard Yeung Sik Yuen has a documented record of judicial independence. The nine commissioners are drawn from the legal profession and academic community. Their recommendations, when published, will be public documents subject to public debate and legislative scrutiny by a parliament whose members, even those with a 60-0-seat advantage, will have to vote on any resulting constitutional amendments. Constitutional amendments in Mauritius require a three-quarters majority of all members of the National Assembly. The government's 60-0 majority satisfies that threshold. But constitutional amendments passed without opposition scrutiny or genuine deliberation are themselves a governance failure that the framework records.