FRELIMO
ruling party of Mozambique since 1977
FRELIMO (Portuguese pronunciation: [fɾɛˈlimu]; from Portuguese: Frente de Libertação de Moçambique, transl. Mozambique Liberation Front) is a democratic socialist political party in Mozambique. It has governed the country since its independence from Portugal in 1975.
Founded in 1962, FRELIMO began as a nationalist movement fighting for the self-determination and independence of Mozambique from Portuguese colonial rule. During its anti-colonial struggle, FRELIMO managed to maintain friendly relations with both the Soviet Union and China, and received military and economic assistance from both. Independence was achieved in June 1975 after the Carnation Revolution in Lisbon the previous year. FRELIMO formally became a political party during its 3rd Party Congress in February 1977, and adopted Marxism–Leninism as its official ideology and FRELIMO Party (Partido FRELIMO) as its official name.
FRELIMO has been the ruling party of Mozambique since then, initially as the sole legal party in a one-party system and later as the democratically elected government in a dominant-party system. FRELIMO fought a protracted civil war from 1976 to 1992 against the anti-communist Mozambican National Resistance or RENAMO. RENAMO received support from the white minority governments of Rhodesia and South Africa. FRELIMO approved a new national constitution in 1990, which ended one-party rule and established a multi-party system. FRELIMO has since become the dominant party in Mozambique and has won a majority of the seats in the Assembly of the Republic in every election since the country's first multi-party election in 1994.
The public source identifies “FRELIMO” as ruling party of Mozambique since 1977. This brief keeps that definition visible, then builds a research path around FRELIMO, ruling and party.
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The citation trail is more important than the brevity of the summary: it shows where individual claims can be examined in context. The source revision retrieved here is dated Aug 12, 2026. The linked authority identifier is Q504564. The first chronological checks are 1975, 1962, 1977 and 1976.
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This entry incorporates text from “FRELIMO” on English Wikipedia. Contributors are listed in the page history. Text is available under the Creative Commons Attribution-ShareAlike 4.0 License. Selected authority identifiers and statements are retrieved from Wikidata under CC0; their references and qualifiers remain part of the verification path.