Daily Archives: October 29, 2013

Madagascar

Madagascar holds long-awaited election, prepares for December runoff

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Though the main actors in Malagasy politics have all been barred from running in Madagascar’s presidential election, they still found a way to overshadow the actual candidates in the country’s October 25 election.madagascar-flag

Results are still trickling in four days after the vote, but with just over 25% of all votes counted, it seems almost certain that the race will head to a December 20 runoff between the top two candidates.

That the vote actually went forward four years after a political coup marks significant progress for Madagascar, which has been trapped in a political and economic crisis since 2009.  With a new constitution in place, however, the new president will hopefully close the door on the turmoil that began with the March 2009 coup that brought opposition leader Andry Rajoelina, then the mayor of Madagascar’s capital of Antananarivo, to power.  Rajoelina replaced Marc Ravalomanana, first elected president in 2002 and reelected overwhelmingly in 2006, following widespread riots over economic conditions, sparking concern from throughout the world, including donor countries like France and the United States.

The country has been essentially transitioning toward last weekend’s presidential election ever since.  Finally scheduled for July 24, the election was postponed to August 23 and, again, to October after repeated delays and clashes among Madagascar’s constitutional court, the electoral commission and the Rajoelina administration.

Last year, the European Union and the African Union brokered a deal whereby both Rajoelina and Ravalomanana agreed not to recontest the presidency, which appeared to clear the way for 2013 elections.  But when former first lady Lalao Ravalomanana declared her own candidacy, Rajoelina declared his candidacy as well, arguing that Ravalomanana’s wife was a sly stand-in for the former president.  For good measure, former president Didier Ratsiraka, who brings an additional set of baggage to Malagasy politics, threw his hat in the ring as well.

Over the summer, however, Madagascar’s electoral court banned all three candidates — Rajoelina, Ravalomanana and Ratsiraka — thereby clearing the way for an entirely new administration relatively untainted by the personal failures of the three men who have governed Madagascar for all but five of the past 38 years.

Among the 33 candidates in the first round, two candidates seem poised to face off in the runoff, and unsurprisingly, they are the two candidates who are supported by both Rajoelina and Ravalomanana.

The first is Jean Louis Robinson (pictured above with Lalao Ravalomanana), a physician who previously served as Ravalomanana’s health minister, who leads with 26.32% of the current vote total.  He has benefitted from the full support of both Ravalomanana and his spouse during the campaign, and his campaign platform involves returning to an updated Madagascar Action Plan (MAP) that Ravalomanana tried to implement in the mid-2000s.

The second is Hery Rajaonarimampianina, Rajoelina’s finance minister between 2009 and 2013, who is in second place with 15.16%.  Though Rajoelina, as sitting president, remains neutral in the race, it’s clear that he is supporting Rajaonarimampianina.  Rajaonarimampianina received a masters’ degree in finance and accounting in Québec in the 1980s, served as director of the National Business Institute in the early 1990s, and worked in the private sector in the 2000s as an auditor and accountant.

Both candidates have promised to take action to boost employment and reduce poverty.   Madagascar, a former French colony with a population of around 22 million, suffers from low growth after years of a relatively planned, socialist economy that flatlined after the 2009 coup, despite Rajoelina’s pledge four years ago to restore democracy.  While the eventual winner of Madagascar’s presidency can look forward to a boost from the resumption of international aid from the European Union and the United States, he will face the need to implement serious and fundamental structural reforms if the Malagasy economy is to become truly competitive globally.

No other candidate is currently polling more than 10% of the vote, but the next five candidates include a who’s who of Malagasy political figures, including other politicians who have held roles in Rajoelina’s government over the past four years:

Continue reading Madagascar holds long-awaited election, prepares for December runoff →

Costa Rica, El Salvador, Honduras, Panama

Chart of the day: Central American GDP per capita

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Central America holds its fair share of elections over the coming months, starting with the November 24 general election in Honduras, where voters will select a new president and all 128 legislators in the Congreso Nacional (National Congress).honduras flag iconPanama Flag Iconcosta_rica_flagel salvador

But that’s just the beginning — El Salvador holds the first round of its presidential election in February 2014, with a potential runoff in March 2014, Costa Rica holds a general election in early February 2014, and Panamá holds its general elections in May 2014.  Guatemala will hold off until autumn 2015 and Nicaragua and Belize will hold off until 2016, when president Daniel Ortega (yes, that one) may well attempt to cling to power.

What’s more, in each of the four Central American elections set to take place in the next seven months, presidential term limits prohibit the incumbent from reelection, so four countries with over 21 million people will make political transitions of some kind.

But what’s most staggering is that the issues in each of the four elections are massively different — GDP per capita varies widely.  Though you can see a slight variance in 1960 setting Panamanian and Costa Rican GDP per capita apart, Guatemala briefly overtook Costa Rica in the early 1980s and Nicaragua was also on essentially the same path as Panamá and Costa Rica before flatlining for a decade starting in the late 1970s (following the Managua earthquake and anticipating the fall of the Somoza regime) and actively falling during the 1980s and early 1990s when the Cold War-inspired civil war devastated the country.  Though El Salvador continued to growth at a slow, steady rate throughout its civil war, which raged from 1979 to 1992, its growth rate exploded in the mid-1990s, and pushed the country to appreciably higher standards of living than its neighbors.

Still, the greatest relatively gains have been made over the past two decades:

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Costa Rica, with its tourism (and its position as a regional hub for Intel microprocessors), and Panamá, with its canal revenues, banking and insurance sectors and, increasingly, also tourism, lead the way.  Panamá City long overtook Managua as Central America’s financial hub.

In short, Panamá and Costa Rica are becoming tropical extensions of North America, with GDP per capita approach $10,000, essentially equivalent to that of México, and just a little lower than Brazil, Argentina, and Chile.

The remaining four countries major countries (minus Belize) are languishing further behind, with some of the lowest standards of living in all of Latin America.

Especially in Honduras, which features the higher homicide rate in the world — a rate that’s more than doubled since 2005 from around 37 homicides per 100,000 to 91.6 in 2011.  The World Bank estimates that violence and crime levels cost Honduran economy about 10% of GDP annually.  Security dominates the election campaign, but it’s a real drag on the economy as well.

Nonetheless, the economy has grown steadily at around 3.5% for the past four years, in part due to the strength of its export economy, fueled by the passage of the Central American Free Trade Agreement (CAFTA-DR) among the United States, Honduras, the Dominican Republic and several other Central American countries.  That has boosted the maquila (assembly) industry, as well as other service and manufacturing sectors in Honduras — agriculture remains important, but bananas represent just about 3.5% of exports in the original ‘banana republic,’ and coffee amounts to just 10% of exports.  The economy remains incredibly tied to the United States — exports to the United States account for about 30% of Honduran GDP and remittances from the United States and elsewhere contribute about 20% of Honduran GDP.

But whereas economists and observers once joked that Honduras was so poor that it couldn’t even afford an oligarchy, it now has the highest Gini coefficient in Central America (57) and one of the highest in the world as inequality continues to rise.  About 60% of Hondurans live below the poverty line.  Moreover, corruption remains a real impediment to foreign investment — Transparency International ranked the country 133rd in 2012, again the lowest score in Central America (and just barely topping the more lowly ranked Venezuela).

In global terms, however, Honduran GDP per capita (around $4,600 on a PPP basis), is relatively wealthy — that’s still higher than in India, Pakistan, Vietnam, Nigeria, Kenya or Ethiopia.