From Ballon d'Or to Ballot Box: George Weah's Election as Liberia's President

George Weah’s route to Liberia’s presidency began on a football pitch, not a campaign trail. Raised in Monrovia’s Clara Town slum, Weah rose through West African club football to a career at Monaco, Paris Saint-Germain, and AC Milan under mentors including Arsène Wenger, who managed him at Monaco. In 1995 he became the first, and to date only, African player to win FIFA’s World Player of the Year award, an honor that year also brought him the Ballon d’Or and African Footballer of the Year title in the same twelve months, a combination no other African footballer had achieved. He retired from playing in 2003, the same year Liberia’s back-to-back civil wars, which had killed an estimated 250,000 people since 1989, finally ended with Charles Taylor’s exile and a UN-backed peace process.

Weah entered Liberian politics soon after, running for president in 2005 against Ellen Johnson Sirleaf, a Harvard-trained economist and former finance minister. Sirleaf won that race and went on to serve two terms, becoming Africa’s first elected female head of state and a co-recipient of the 2011 Nobel Peace Prize, while Weah built a political base as a senator for Montserrado County starting in 2014 and as a two-time runner-up for the presidency, having also lost a 2011 vice-presidential bid alongside Winston Tubman. When Sirleaf’s second term ended in 2017, barred by term limits from running again, Weah entered the field for a third time, this time as the Coalition for Democratic Change’s presidential candidate with running mate Jewel Taylor, Charles Taylor’s ex-wife.

The first round of voting on October 10, 2017, produced no outright winner among candidates that included Weah, Vice President Joseph Boakai of the ruling Unity Party, and third-place finisher Charles Brumskine. A Supreme Court challenge over alleged irregularities pushed the scheduled runoff back from early November to December 26, 2017. When it was finally held, Weah won decisively, taking roughly 61.5 percent of the vote, about 732,000 ballots, to Boakai’s 38.5 percent, on a turnout of just under 56 percent. Weah was visibly emotional as results came in, thanking supporters who had turned out to celebrate his win in the streets of Monrovia even before the final count was certified.

He was sworn in on January 22, 2018, at Samuel Kanyon Doe Stadium outside Monrovia, before a crowd that had lined up for kilometers and a roster of visiting African heads of state and former teammates from his playing days. In his inaugural address, Weah emphasized the manner of the handover as much as the result itself: “We have arrived here neither by violence, nor by force of arms,” he told the crowd. “Not a single life was lost in the process. Rather, this transition was achieved by the free and democratic will of the Liberian people, guaranteed by the rule of law.” The observation was not rhetorical flourish; Weah’s inauguration marked Liberia’s first peaceful transfer of power between two democratically elected presidents in more than seven decades, a milestone made possible by the very post-war stability Sirleaf’s presidency had worked to build and that Weah, once her electoral rival, now inherited.