First Free Elections After a Dictatorship

A founding election is the day a country that has lived under a junta, a dictator or a single ruling party chooses its government freely again. These are the landmark ones, from southern Europe in the 1970s to Africa and Asia in the 2010s, in date order. The test for a place was a genuinely competitive vote whose result was accepted and acted on. Each entry says what the election settled, what it left unfinished and how the democracy it opened has fared since, because some held for decades and others did not. Several were deliberately incomplete: Poland in 1989 reserved most seats for the ruling bloc, and Myanmar in 2015 kept a quarter for the army. Votes that were openly stolen, or that only rotated power inside a ruling party, are left out, as are the postwar elections held under Allied occupation, which belong to a different story.