Yet again, meaningful democracy in Haiti has been eluded in favor of short-term stability. Although a new date for elections was decided last January, no conditions close to being fair and democratic have been met.
After months of electoral processes were thought to be lacking transparency, it is clear that recent elections were found to be highly dubious and fraudulent, and would not bring stability to the country. Quite the contrary, conditions were created to fuel a justified and widespread rejection of an existing corrupt political system.
Disgracefully, international observers including mainstream newspapers and the Organization of American States (OAS) have welcomed sham elections despite widespread irregularities abetted by outgoing President Michel Martelly’s authoritarian behavior. Weeks before the scheduled runoff on December 27, this scheme would all but guarantee a long-term post-election crisis.
Up to now, this warped political strategy has been successful for Martelly. He was initially elected to be president on March 10, 2011, only after Haiti’s most popular political party, Fanmi Lavalas, founded by former President Jean-Bertrand Aristide had been barred from the election, thanks in large part to the US State Department and the OAS. Because of those and other outside forces, he still leads the game.
Apparently aiming to impose the electoral agenda, Martelly himself chose the electoral authorities in the form of the Provisional Electoral Council (Conseil Électoral Provisoire, or CEP). He will control parliament, and the candidate he hand-picked to succeed him, Jovenel Moïse of the Parti Haitien Tèt Kale (PHTK), who is likely to win the runoff on December 27. Needless to say, democracy remains in jeopardy.
A chain of events announcing flawed elections
This is no surprise. The decrees regulating the electoral process and creating the makeup of the CEP were both mainly drafted and chosen by the executive power represented by President Martelly, after he first dissolved parliament due to the fact that two thirds of the senate seats and the chamber of deputies were vacant after elections were not held, meaning that congress couldn’t function.
This took place after President Martelly blocked several attempts made by the opposition-controlled parliament to pass its own electoral regulations, and after he failed to agree with Parliament on the composition of the CEP (three members from the senate, three from the chamber of deputies, and three from the executive branch) as constitutionally required.
Martelly depicted parliament as unwilling to move on new elections in order to preserve its own power – a criticism that most likely does not lack truth in a country in which the chequered landscape is politically fragmented with little coherent ideology. As reported by the International Crisis Group in February 2013, the lack of “ideological clarity leaves citizens unable … to choose between clearly defined platforms” in this fragmented political landscape. “Over 100 parties and groups have [each] produced the 5,000 signatures required for registration,” according to the report.
To some extent this diffusion of political input masks the fact that actual power rests in the hands of only a few well-positioned party leaders. As it stands, Haitian political parties fail at the most basic tasks, failing to articulate institutionalized policies and or effectively reach out to citizens. In such a context, president Martelly has had little difficulty becoming the dominant political actor.
Amid this institutional blockage, on January 7, 2015, he began meeting with members of parliament to try to reach a deal on the electoral law and the composition of the CEP. Negotiations continued for more than a week, and as reported by Al Jazeera at the time, “just hours before the country marked the fifth anniversary of the earthquake that left some 300,000 people dead … the president and some of the opposition politicians reached a long-term agreement [requiring elections to be decided] before the end of 2015 for two-thirds of the senate and deputies, as well as for president.”
This new agreement, which contained nothing groundbreaking, was part of an already long list of agreements arrived at mostly to give the news media something to cover and which was guaranteed to lead to the current post-electoral crisis and deepen Haiti’s long-lasting political stalemate.
The main opposition party in Haiti, Fanmi Lavalas, which for highly questionable reasons was not able to run in the 2011 elections, was not even part of the talks. This new agreement was a weak and ineffective compromise which allowed the executive branch to choose the composition of the CEP, the procedures, and dates to be followed in the next elections, despite this being the province of parliament.
The agreement of January 11, 2015, was signed by 24 political parties of which 21 had no elected representatives in parliament, illustrating its lack of legitimacy: The executive branch, through its decrees, decided the elections’ timetable and the CEP’s composition, as well as the financing of the election by foreign actors. The president has been, for close to a year, governing alone, without parliament, through decree.
In a last-ditch attempt to legislate and subsequently legalize these agreements, parliament tried to reach a voting quorum on January 11, 2015, but in effect, no deal could be reached and so it became considered as a dysfunctional body, with an insufficient number of members in both chambers. Only 10 senators were still legally elected, leaving the senate with only one-third of its maximum composition.
A year ago, Sandra Honoré, the head of the UN Mission to Stabilize Haiti (MINUSTAH), explained what had caused a group of six senators to unite and block the electoral law: “Despite the executive branch’s repeated public statements in favor of holding the elections as soon as possible [it] had intentionally delayed the process to ensure that parliament would become non-functional.”
Parliament was therefore dissolved and a de facto prime minister, Paul Evans, took office although his appointment was not ratified by the remaining legislators as constitutionally required. Understandably, therefore, most of the political parties and the opposition forces were skeptical about the CEP’s independence and the state of democracy in their country.Results of the October 25 election: lack of transparency and fraud led to even more doubtful results
After a year of a doomed political process, the imposition by the executive branch of a new electoral law and the composition of the CEP, as well as several days of a questionable review by the CEP of the ballots cast on October 25, the results of the first round of the presidential election were announced on November 5. It is important that this fraudulent series of events has had the seal of approval of the Core Group, which is comprised of the ambassadors of Brazil, Canada, the European Union, France, Spain, and the United States, and the Special Representative of the OAS.
As reported by the Center for Economic and Policy Research (CEPR), the results prescribed a presidential runoff between the Parti Haitien Tèt Kale (PHTK)’s Jovenel Moïse and LAPEH’s Jude Celestin, which will be held on December 27. (LaPeh means “peace” in creole.) Moïse, hand-picked by President Martelly to succeed him, supposedly came in first with close to 33 percent of the vote; Celestin, an important opposition figure, who the OAS kicked out of the runoff during the 2011 presidential elections, had slightly more than 25 percent of the vote.
Jean-Charles Moises came in third with 14 percent of the vote, and Fanmi Lavalas’ Maryse Narcisse was next with seven percent.
• Clément Doleac is a research fellow at the Council on Hemispheric Affairs. This column is published with permission from Caribbean News Now.
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