Monthly Archives: November 2013

Chile

Chilean parliamentary and presidential (first round) election results

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Chile’s general elections on Sunday went just about as much as expected. chile

Michelle Bachelet leads all over candidates by a margin of over 20%, but with just 46.68% support, she’ll narrowly miss the absolute majority that she needs to avoid a December 15 runoff.  Bachelet, who served as Chile’s president between 2006 and 2010, is the candidate of the Nueva Mayoria (New Majority) coalition, which is itself based on the broad center-left Concertación that’s won four out of the five past elections since the return of regular democracy in Chile in the late 1980s after the regime of Augusto Pinochet.

In second place, also as widely expected, is Evelyn Matthei with 25.01% — Matthei is a former senator and a former minister of labor in the administration of outgoing center-right president Sebastián Piñera, who is the candidate of the broad center-right coalition that’s comprised of Piñera’s Renovación Nacional (RN, National Renewal) and Matthei’s more conservative Unión Demócrata Independiente (UDI, Independent Democratic Union).

But given how close Bachelet came to winning an outright majority, she is almost assured of victory against Matthei in the second round — so the next four weeks of campaigning will likely amount to somewhat of a victory lap for Bachelet, who hopes to become the first former Chilean president to return for a second, non-consecutive term in recent history.

It’s been a difficult year for Chilean conservatives — its center-right coalition, the Coalición por el Cambio (Coalition for Change),  widely known as the Alianza por Chile (Alliance for Chile), which saw its frontrunner for president, former energy minister Laurence Golborne withdraw from the race in the spring due to accusations of malfeasance stemming from his time in the private sector, and which saw its elected presidential nominee, former economy minister Pablo Longueira, withdraw promptly after winning the hard-fought nomination on account of clinical depression.

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Surprisingly far behind in third place were two relatively independent candidates.

Marco Enríquez-Ominami (popularly known as ‘MEO’), ran a stridently leftist campaign as the founder and leader of the Partido Progresista (Progressive Party), and he hoped to improve on his performance in the December 2009 first-round presidential election, when he won 20% of the vote.  Instead, he won just 10.96% of the vote, a disappointment for Enríquez-Ominami’s feisty campaign and the sign that the broad center-left electorate largely coalesced around Bachelet’s candidacy.

Perhaps even more disappointing was the performance of Franco Parisi, who won just 10.12% of the vote — an independent center-right candidate, Parisi was vying for second place in polls with Matthei a month ago before Matthei started attacking Parisi, a popular professor and economist, especially with regard to allegations that he withheld $200,000 of employee wages.

While Bachelet may have enjoyed winning the presidency outright, more important to her and the Nueva Mayoria coalition are the results of the parliamentary elections also held on Sunday — Chileans were electing all 120 members of the Cámara de Diputados (Chamber of Deputies), the lower house of Chile’s parliament, and a little over one-half of the 38-member Senado (Senate), the upper house.

With just over 95% of the vote counted for the Chamber of Deputies, the center-left Nueva Mayoria held 65 seats, the center-right Alianza held 47 seats, with four seats still undecided, and with one seat going to the Progressive Party and three seats going to independents, leaving Bachelet and the center-left on the cusp of winning the 69 seats necessary for a four-sevenths majority in the lower house, which is necessary to enact the kind of major educational and tax reforms that Bachelet hopes to pass in the next four years, but not the two-thirds majority necessary for constitutional revisions. Under Chile’s ‘binomial’ system, however, in which two deputies are elected from each of 60 districts, it’s difficult to achieve a lopsided victory in either direction in either house of parliament.

In the Senate, of the 20 seats up for election, the Nueva Mayoria has won 12, the Alianza just six, with one independent and one still to be determined.  Given that the other 18 Senate seats divided between nine for the center-left and nine for the center-right in the previous December 2009 election, that would give Nueva Mayoria at least 21 seats in the Senate and the Alianza 15 — enough for a clear majority, but again just on the cusp of winning a four-sevenths majority (22) in the upper house as well.

As Duke University professor Ariel Dorfman wrote in The Guardian over the weekend, the two were once childhood playmates when their fathers both served in the Chilean air force — Matthei’s father supported Pinochet in the September 1973 coup against president Salvador Allende, while Bachelet’s father opposed the coup and was subsequently imprisoned, tortured and died in prison in 1974:

Fernando Matthei was a military attache at the London embassy when the coup led by Augusto Pinochet destroyed Chilean democracy. He could do nothing to help the friend with whom he used to exchange classical records and talk into the night about sports, politics and literature. But his failure to act could no longer be justified, however, when he returned to Santiago at the end of 1973 and was named director of the aviation’s War Academy – the very building in which Alberto Bachelet was to die two months later. Though several judicial reviews and trials found that then Colonel Matthei had no penal culpability in the death of General Alberto Bachelet – the cellars where his comrade-in-arms were being tormented were off limits to anyone not working as an interrogator – the guilt still haunts him. In his 2009 book, he admitted: “Prudence outweighed courage.”

Not even the most delirious novelist could have imagined a more unusual history of differing destinies. One dies because he had the courage, though perhaps not the prudence, of accepting to head the distribution and food centre of Allende’s government, a post that had ministerial status. The other lives a life of excessive prudence and no courage and is ultimately named to the ruling junta. General Matthei also served as health minister in Pinochet’s cabinet – a portfolio that Michelle Bachelet held a generation later. As for Evelyn Matthei, she was a senator and then labour minister in Piñera’s government. A study in contrasts: the socialist who became Chile’s president and the conservative who aspires to that presidency.

Bachelet and her family sought exile in Australia and East Germany, and Bachelet returned to Chile only in 1979 as a pediatrician.

Third-place candidate Enríquez-Ominami’s father, a revolutionary leftist who also opposed the coup, was also executed by the Pinochet regime, and the effect demonstrates just how much the ghosts of 1973 (and the ghosts of the Pinochet regime, which governed until 1989) haunt contemporary Chilean politics.

Continue reading Chilean parliamentary and presidential (first round) election results →

Chile

Bachelet’s ambitious agenda to be determined by result of Chile’s parliamentary elections

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No matter who wins tomorrow’s presidential election in Chile — and by what margin — we will know much more about the nature of the Chilean government over the next four years from the result of the other elections that will be held.chile

Those are the parliamentary elections, in which Chileans will elect all 120 members of the Cámara de Diputados (Chamber of Deputies), the lower house of Chile’s parliament, and half of the 38-member Senado (Senate), the upper house.

The inability of current president Sebastián Piñera to win absolute majorities in the Chilean parliament in the previous December 2009 elections constrained his legislative ability over the past four years to enact the kind of market liberalization or other reforms that Piñera might otherwise have pursued.

Likewise, though former president Michelle Bachelet is the overwhelming favorite to return to La Moneda, the Chilean presidential palace, the extent to which her administration will be able to enact campaign promises depends in large part on her ability to win a parliamentary majority for the broad left coalition that she leads, Nueva Mayoria (New Majority), which is essentially a rebranding of the broad center-left coalition of Chilean parties, the Concertación de Partidos por la Democracia (Concert of Parties for Democracy) — with the recent addition of the Partido Comunista (Community Party) and a couple of other minor parties.

Though it seems likely that Bachelet’s coalition will win a majority in both houses, no one knows how large their margin will be — and, of course, with the widening of the previous Concertación to include the Communists and other far-left groups, maintaining unity within Bachelet’s coalition will be even harder in the years ahead.  That’s especially true in light of the lofty platform that Bachelet has outlined during her campaign —  Bachelet hopes to achieve major tax reform (an increase in the corporate tax rate from 20% to 25% and a cut in the maximum income tax rate from 40% to 35%), education reform (free access to university within the next six years) and, most ambitiously, a new Chilean constitution.  Constitutional changes require a two-thirds majority in both houses, an outcome that’s extremely unlikely, and even large-scale reforms, such as the kind Bachelet hopes to enact for Chilean education, require a four-sevenths majority.

That, in turn, is due to Chile’s electoral system, which is designed to avoid large majorities in either direction.  In respect of the Chamber of Deputies, Chileans vote in 60 constituencies that elect two members each — Chile’s unique binomial system that Pinochet’s advisers stitched into Chile’s current constitution before ceding power to civilian leadership in 1989.  While each coalition can run two candidate in each district, the typical result is that each major coalition each wins one seat in each constituency — one coalition will only be awarded both seats if it defeats the second coalition by a two-to-one margin.  A similar system exists for the Senate — Chileans elect two senators in each of 19 senatorial districts.

Moreover, Bachelet faces a new challenge from the Partido Progresista (Progressive Party of Chile), the party created two years ago by Marco  Enríquez-Ominami, who won about 20% as an independent candidate in the previous 2009 presidential election and who is running again in this weekend’s presidential election.  Although no one predicts that the Progressive Party is likely to steal many seats in the parliamentary vote, even one or two seats in each chamber could significantly alter Bachelet’s ability to govern.  Continue reading Bachelet’s ambitious agenda to be determined by result of Chile’s parliamentary elections →

Canada, Ontario

Meet Kathleen Wynne — Ontario’s premier and the 180-degree opposite of Rob Ford

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Though it’s been five months since the first reports emerged that Toronto mayor Rob Ford smoked crack cocaine, it’s only been within the last week that the controversy surrounding Ford has reached truly staggering attention.toronto ontarioCanada Flag Icon

When the embattled mayor earlier this month admitted that he used crack cocaine in a drunken stupor, he only opened the floodgates to more questions — and more allegations, which have certainly followed in short order.  It’s been a truly catastrophic week for Ford, who made his problems even worse with some misogynist comments about a former female aide, his refusal to step down as mayor, further admissions that he’d purchased illegal drugs in the last two years, and that he’s operated a vehicle while drunk.

But this week also marks the first time that anyone’s suggested that the province of Ontario should step in — and that’s putting Ontario premier Kathleen Wynne in the spotlight, who is the absolute opposite of everything Ford represents.  Wynne is not only the first female premier of Ontario and the highest-ranking openly gay official in Canadian politics, Wynne exemplifies the polite, dignified consensus-driven leadership for which Canada has become so well-known.

Wynne gently waded into Toronto’s growing crisis earlier this week, urging Ford to take heed of the Toronto city council’s call to step down:

“The concern for me is that city council can function and it seems today that that’s exactly what’s happening,” she said, referring to two overwhelming council votes to politically emasculate the mayor by stripping him of some powers.  “I see that city council is making decisions and they are determined . . . to find a way to make that work,” the premier said at a Council of the Federation meeting in Toronto.

There’s not much that the Ontario premier can actually do to remove Ford, though Wynne opened the door to legislative action earlier this week — but only at the request of the Toronto city council and only with the support of the leaders of both the Progressive Conservative Party of Ontario, Tim Hudak, and the Ontario New Democratic Party, Andrea Horwath.

Ironically, it’s the ‘amalgamation’ plan that former Progressive Conservative prime minister Mike Harris pushed through the Ontario legislative assembly in 1998, over the protest of many Toronto residents, that made Rob Ford’s 2010 election possible.  Under amalgamation, the city of Toronto merged with the surrounding communities of East York, Etobicoke, North York, Scarborough, and York — Ford himself comes from Etobicoke, a suburb to the west of Toronto’s urban core.

Meanwhile, the Toronto city council is likewise limited in its ability to remove Ford from office, though it voted to strip Ford of many of his powers on Friday — on a vote of 39-3, councillors removed Ford’s ability to hire or to fire the city’s standing committee chairs and the deputy mayor, and on a vote of 41-2, councillors voted that Ford’s powers should be delegated to the deputy mayor in the event of an emergency situation.  Despite the council’s limitations, it’s important to keep in mind that the office of mayor in Toronto is relatively circumscribed — in many ways, Ford is more like the council chief than a true chief executive with the broad executive powers of, say, the New York City mayor.

Ford has become an international punchline, to the horror of many Toronto residents, who are proud of a city long known as Canada’s financial capital, a magnet for immigration, and a quiet showcase of North American prosperity and safety.

Far less well-known is Wynne, who is the anti-Ford of Ontario politics.  In her remarks on the Toronto mayoral situation earlier this week, she stressed that Ford’s antics do not characterize Ontario and do not characterize Toronto — Wynne herself represents Toronto in Ontario’s legislative assembly:

“I believe Toronto is not defined by one person, by one politician. We have to be very careful that we not allow ourselves to be defined by this,” she said.

Still, the premier expressed sympathy for Ford and his family, given the mayor’s drinking and admitted illegal drug use.  “I’m very concerned about the human element of this. A person who is struggling in his life, as far as I can tell, and so I hope that he will look after himself.”

Wynne became the province’s first female premier in February.  But that’s not exactly a surprising feat in Canada, where Kim Campbell served as the first female prime minister (however briefly) for just over four months in 1993, and where the premiers of Québec, Alberta and British Columbia are all women.  What makes Wynne more remarkable is that she’s the first openly gay premier of any Canadian province. Continue reading Meet Kathleen Wynne — Ontario’s premier and the 180-degree opposite of Rob Ford →

Maldives

Half-brother of longtime authoritarian leader Gayoom wins Maldivian presidential runoff

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Though the long-delayed presidential election process in the Maldives often seemed in danger of never coming to a completion, today’s Maldivian runoff has apparently selected a new president — five days after the Maldivian constitution required an inauguration and a week after the first round of the rescheduled vote.maldives

Former president Mohammed Nasheed won nearly 47% of the vote in the first round  — and around 45.5% in the previous first round held in September (which was subsequently annulled by the Maldivian supreme court).

But last week’s runner-up Abdulla Yameen (pictured above) emerged victorious today in the runoff, boosting his support from around 30% in the first round to 51.39% today.  Nasheed won just 48.61%.

Nasheed became the first democratically elected president in Maldivian history when he won the previous 2008 presidential election, though he was pushed out of office in February 2012 following protests over rising prices and a poor economy.  Nasheed achieved international fame for the cause of climate change — at an average of around four feet above sea level, the Maldives face destruction from global warming and rising sea levels.

But those concerns were distant from the 2013 election and political crisis.  Yameen’s electoral win is a victory for Maumoon Abdul Gayoom, who ruled the Maldives from 1978 to 2008 (Nasheed defeated Gayoom in the 2008 election).  Gayoom, however, never fully left the stage of Maldivian politics — Yameen is his half-brother, and many of the Maldivian state institutions, especially its judiciary, are believed to remain more loyal to Gayoom than to the rule of law.

Though the Indian and global media are reporting that Yameen’s victory is somewhat of a surprise, it shouldn’t be.  Nasheed failed, however narrowly, to surpass the critical 50% mark in both the annulled September 7 round and in the November 9 round.  Moreover, the third-place candidate, Qasim Ibrahim, a former Gayoom-era finance minister, won 23% in the previous vote, and he subsequently endorsed Yameen.  It was Ibrahim’s complaint about potential ballot fraud following the first round that led the Maldivian supreme court to annul the September vote, a move that was widely seen as an opportunity for Nasheed’s opponents to unite around Yameen.

It’s clear that after three votes, Nasheed marshals something just short of an absolute majority (45.45%, 46.93%, 48.61%) of the Maldivian electorate.  While the process may not have been comically flawed, the votes demonstrate that Nasheed simply failed to build a fully majoritarian coalition for his relatively secular, technocratic, pro-democracy, pro-development vision.  It’s important to remember that five years ago, when Nasheed capitalized on three decades of pent-up resentments over the Gayoom regime, he defeated the old authoritarian with just 53.65% of the vote.  While Nasheed has conceded defeat in today’s vote, in a move to reinforce respect for the country’s nascent democratic institutions, Gayoom’s resurgence leaves those fragile institutions somewhat in doubt.

Yameen, the candidate of the Progressive Party of Maldives (PPM), a party that Gayoom founded in 2011, campaigned on harsh criminal penalties — including the death penalty.  Nasheed had campaigned on a more broadly economic platform of boosting tourism revenues and business development.

Perhaps more fundamentally, Yameen and Ibrahim accused Nasheed and the Maldivian Democratic Party of being too close to the West and too secular in the Muslim country of just 328,000 residents.  Nasheed, in turn, argued that Yameen was using religion as a wedge issue to stir resentment and allow for Islamism to take root.

China

What we know (and what we don’t) about China’s CCP ‘third plenum’ meeting

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CHINA-BEIJING-18TH CPC CENTRAL COMMITTEE-THIRD PLENARY SESSION (CN)

The only certainty about the communiqué that resulted from the third plenum meeting of the ruling Chinese Communist Party (中国共产党) is that you should trust no one who claims to have sometime certain to say about its meaning. China Flag Icon

But that hasn’t stopped a phalanx of Sinologists from Beijing to London and from Shanghai to New York from trying to divine the meaning of the communiqué and what it might behold for the next decade of Chinese economy planning under its new president and ‘paramount leader’ Xi Jinping (习近平), who’s also the general secretary of the CCP’s central committee.

So far, Xi has spent much of 2013 waging an anti-corruption campaign at all levels of the CCP and Chinese government, and emphasizing a less ostentatious style of governance (‘four dishes and a soup‘).  The most optimistic forecasters, both within and outside China, predicted that Xi and the party’s central committee, a group of the top 350 CCP officials, would move forward during the third plenum with a bold policy agenda that could give some policy substance to Xi’s ‘Chinese Dream’ rhetoric.  China’s state-controlled media even encouraged this line of thinking.

Perhaps Xi would finally end China’s one-child policy!

Perhaps Xi would announce the transition to an even more robust private sector!

Perhaps Xi would announce that the value of the renminbi would be determined by the market!

Perhaps Xi would stand on his head, pardon former Chongqing part boss Bo Xilai, sing a couple of ‘Cultural Revolution’ songs from the Mao era, lift the ‘Great Firewall,’ and establish a timetable for Tibetan independence!

No such luck — at least, so far as anyone can tell, though a more precise resolution will emerge in the days ahead.  While it’s hard to find two analysts who agree on exactly what the communiqué foretells, .  Xi is consolidating his power!  Xi’s been stymied by the technocrats! It’s a triumph for the state sector! It’s a triumph for the private sector!

Here’s a brief portion of the 3,500 word communiqué (5,000 Chinese characters):

The Plenum stressed that the successful practice of reform and opening up has provided important experiences for completely deepening reform, and must be persisted in for a long time. The most important matters are persisting in the leadership of the Party, implementing the Party’s basic line, not marching the old road of closedness and fossilization, not marching the evil road of changing banners and allegiances, persisting in marching the path of Socialism with Chinese characteristics, guaranteeing the correct direction of reform and opening up throughout; persisting in liberating thoughts, seeking truth from facts, progressing with the times, seeking truth and being pragmatic, starting from reality in everything, summarizing domestic successful methods, learning from beneficial foreign experience, and daring to move theoretical and practical innovation forward; persisting in putting people first, respecting the dominant role of the people, giving rein to the pioneering spirit of the masses, closely relying on the people to promote reform, stimulating people’s comprehensive development; persisting in correctly handling the relationship between reform, development and stability, we must be bold, our pace must be steady, we must strengthen the integration of top-level design and crossing the river by feeling the stones, both stimulate overall progress and focus breakthroughs, raise the scientific nature of policymaking, broadly concentrate consensus and form joint forces for reform.

Those words might well also serve as a guide to understanding the communiqué itself — ‘crossing the river by feeling the stones,’ indeed.  I’m not sure that Sir Humphrey Appleby could have improved on the document’s maddening vagueness.  The Wall Street Journal summarized the statement as follows:

The communiqué called for fewer investment restrictions, greater rights for farmers and a more transparent system for local and national government taxing and spending—all areas where economists say China badly needs reform. But in lieu of specific plans it ambiguously emphasized the need to “encourage, support and guide” the private sector, while at the same time reaffirming “the leading role of the state-owned economy.”

In a small acknowledgment of the clamor for better protection of individual rights, the communiqué noted the need to establish an independent judiciary. But again it reaffirmed the leading role of the party, which has the power to trump China’s constitution.

Here’s an even more useful WSJ post that provides eight different takes from economists on the communiqué’s meaning.  Perhaps the most helpful analysis comes from the BBC, which published the following word cloud of the communiqué and otherwise argued that the statement represents a stay-the-course commitment to economic reform:

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But vague has long been in vogue on the path of Chinese policymaking, especially economic policy.  Is it any less vague for China specialists to make vague calls for Xi to ‘deliver’?  What would that entail?  Looking back, even today, can you list with certainty the five top policy legacies will be for Hu Jintao (胡锦涛) and the Chinese leadership between 2002 and 2012?

Over the course of this week, we’ve watched US president Barack Obama apologize for the rollout and planning of one particular reform to one sector of the US economy.  Yes, health care is a relatively large sector of the economy and yes, the government is already an important player in that sector, in light of Medicaid programs for the poor, Medicare programs for the elderly, Social Security benefits for the disabled and a separate care system for veterans and those in the armed forces.  But it’s not clear if the Obama administration has any idea what will happen to the private health care insurance market over the next two months, let alone the next ten years.

Now imagine the task at hand for Xi Jinping and the Chinese government, who are expected to set a course not just for China’s health care sector, but for the entire economy, including a sizable public sector and a private sector that’s still very much linked to state power — in a country with 1.35 billion people, which is a population of about, oh, one billion more than in the United States.  It’s a country that has about 42 cities with a population equivalent to or greater than the size of Chicago. Continue reading What we know (and what we don’t) about China’s CCP ‘third plenum’ meeting →

Australia

Rudd’s departure from Australian politics vital to Labor’s future

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It’s hard to find anyone in Australia who lacks strong feelings about former prime minister Kevin Rudd.Australia Flag Icon

Some Australians believe that Rudd is among the most talented politicians of his era, who led Australia’s Labor Party out of the wilderness and into government in 2007, who set the stage for a landmark carbon pricing scheme (that Australia’s new center-right prime minister Tony Abbott now hopes to repeal), and who earlier this year salvaged what would have been a landslide loss of devastatingly historical proportions under Labor prime minister Julia Gillard.

Some Australians believe that Rudd, for all his political gifts, is a temperamental figure who failed to push through legislative accomplishments and  whose dysfunctional leadership inevitably led to the 2010 putsch that ousted him and installed Gillard as Labor Party leader and as prime minister.  They also believe that his constant briefing after the 2010 leadership change almost fatally wounded Gillard and Labor in the August 2010 election, and that as foreign minister between 2010 and 2012, Rudd continued to harm Gillard to the point that a desperate Labor caucus turned to Rudd at the last minute in June 2013 to save them from impending electoral doom.

That’s why there was simply no way that Labor can fully move forward from the poisonous Rudd-Gillard era while Rudd continues to sit in the Australian parliament — and that’s why Rudd stepped down on Wednesday from his Queensland seat in the House of Commons, which he had held continuously since 1998.

As Rudd himself noted in his announcement that it was ‘time to zip,’ it’s become a precedent that former prime ministers on both the left and the right leave parliament shortly after losing elections:

“It was right and proper that I report my decision to the Parliament at the earliest opportunity. “That day is today. I have chosen to do so now to create minimal disruptions to the normal proceedings of the house.

“My predecessors as prime minister, Whitlam, Fraser, Hawke and Keating, reached similar decisions to leave the Parliament before the subsequent election.  As did would-be prime ministers, Costello and Downer, perhaps prime minister Howard would have done the same had he retained the seat of Bennelong, although we will never know.”

The sharp ding at Howard was classic Rudd — Howard famously lost his seat in the 2007 landslide that ushered Rudd and Labor to power.  Rudd himself faced a difficult fight in the September 2013 election, though he ultimately survived a strong Liberal challenge (moreover, it’s not certain that Labor will retain the seat now that Rudd is resigning).
Continue reading Rudd’s departure from Australian politics vital to Labor’s future →

Czech Republic

Sobotka turns to forming government after troubling internal ČSSD revolt

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Normally, party leaders face the boot when they lose elections, not after they win them.czech

But that’s what happened in the Czech Republic, when the center-left Česká strana sociálně demokratická (ČSSD, Czech Social Democratic Party) narrowly topped the country’s parliamentary elections in late October with just over 20% of the vote.

Though the Social Democrats won the election, they took just 50 out of 200 seats in the Poslanecká sněmovna (the Chamber of Deputies), the lower house of the Czech parliament, and only nearly edged out a new populist, anti-corruption, business-friendly party, the Akce nespokojených občanů (ANO, Action of Dissatisfied Citizens), founded just two years ago by wealth businessman Andrej Babiš.

That left the leader of the Social Democrats, Bohuslav Sobotka, in a difficult position.  The fractured result means that the Social Democrats will have to find at least another 50 deputies in order to govern — and despite the willingness of the Social Democrats to work alongside the Komunistická strana Čech a Moravy (KSČM, Communist Party of Bohemia and Moravia) for the first time in the post-Soviet era, the 33 seats that the Communists won won’t alone be enough to float a Social Democrat-led government.

But what left his leadership truly in question was a split between two wings of his party, a pro-Sobotka wing that hopes to keep its distance from the Czech Republic’s new president, Miloš Zeman, and a pro-Zeman wing that seeks closer collaboration between the two.  Zeman led the Social Democrats over a decade ago, and he served as Czech prime minister from 1998 to 2002.  A falling-out with the ČSSD leadership in the mid-2000s, however, caused Zeman to quit the Social Democrats and form a new party.

Zeman triumphed in his own right in the January 2013 presidential election — the first such direct election in Czech politics — and has spent the greater part of the year trying to muscle even more power for the Czech presidency at the expense of the parliamentary government.

So almost immediately following the election, Zeman (pictured above, left, with Sobotka) and top members of the pro-Zeman wing of the Social Democrats, including the party’s deputy leader Michal Hašek, held a secret meeting.  That preceded a call for Sobotka to step down as leader on the basis that Sobotka’s personalized, centralized campaign led to a poorer-than-expected result.

The ‘coup’ soon fell apart, though — Hašek and other participants in the secret meeting with Zeman lied about it, Sobotka rallied his supporters  against Zeman’s interference in internal party affairs, Czech overwhelming blamed Hašek for causing political instability and so, for now, Sobotka remains leader and Hašek has stepped down as deputy chair.

Sobotka won a battle, but it’s far from clear that he’ll even be the next prime minister.  Continue reading Sobotka turns to forming government after troubling internal ČSSD revolt →

Chile

Can Bachelet win a first-round victory in Chile’s presidential election?

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Michelle Bachelet is almost certain to set a new precedent in post-Pinochet Chilean politics when she wins a second (non-consecutive) term as president, returning to the office she held between 2006 and 2010. chile

But it’s an open question as to whether Bachelet (pictured above) will do so with a first-round victory — meaning that Bachelet will need to win at least 50% of the vote on Sunday, November 17 in order to avoid a runoff later in December.

Bachelet’s victory would return the broad center-left Concertación de Partidos por la Democracia (Concert of Parties for Democracy) to La Moneda, Chile’s presidential palace after the center-right presidency of businessman Sebastián Piñera, the first non-Concertación president in Chile’s post-Pinochet era, which began with the October 1988 referendum in which Chilean voters opposed extending the reign of Augusto Pinochet’s  on

Some polls show Bachelet tantalizingly close to achieving enough support for a first-round victory.  An Opina Research poll published by El Comercio earlier this week shows Bachelet with 46%, to just 22% for Evelyn Matthei, the candidate of Chile’s center-right coalition, the Coalición por el Cambio (Coalition for Change), but widely known as the Alianza por Chile (Alliance for Chile).  A Centro de Estudios Públicos poll from last week shows Bachelet with 47% and Matthei with just 14%.

But an even more recent IPSOS survey conducted between October 19 and November 5 shows that Bachelet is very likely to head to a runoff — even after stripping out undecided voters, Bachelet won just 35% and Matthei won 22%.

Bachelet’s problem is that Matthei doesn’t represent her sole competition.  Two third-party candidates routinely poll between 10% and 15% in surveys, and they could shake up Sunday’s race if Bachelet’s supporters remain complacent and center-right voters remain unenthusiastic about Matthei.

The first is Marco Enríquez-Ominami (popularly known as ‘MEO’), who burst onto the Chilean political scene in 2009 when he left the Partido Socialista de Chile (PS, Socialist Party of Chile) to run for president as an independent.  MEO ultimately won 20% of the vote, falling behind both Piñera and the runner-up, former president Eduardo Frei Ruiz-Tagle.  Enríquez-Ominami founded the Partido Progresista (Progressive Party) in 2010, and he’s running again for president on a stridently leftist platform that openly embraces the communist legacy of former Chilean president Salvador Allende, who died in the 1973 coup that brought Augusto Pinochet to power.  The events of both the Allende presidency and the Pinochet regime continue to loom heavily over Chilean politics.

But another independent candidate has stolen some thunder from both MEO and Matthei.  Franco Parisi, a popular economist and business professor, and a a former councillor of Chile’s copper commission between 2010 and 2012, is running as a centrist candidate in the presidential elections.  Matthei has launched a negative onslaught against Parisi over the past few weeks, accusing him of owing $200,000 in back wages to employees, and though her negative attacks have reversed some of Parisi’s gains, he’s still polling in the mid-teens.

A third candidate, Marcel Claude, a former official in Chile’s central bank and an environmental activist, is running as an independent with the endorsement of Chile’s small Humanist Party.

In the most recent IPSOS poll, 15% of voters supported Parisi, 12% supported Enríquez-Ominami, 7% supported Claude and 5% supported other small candidates — taken together, that means that 39% of Chileans support a third candidate in 2013, even more than support Bachelet.  Moreover, depressed turnout for Mathei’s candidacy could conceivably launch either Parisi or Enríquez-Ominami into a runoff with Bachelet — it would be the first such presidential runoff that didn’t feature a race between the mainstream center-left Concertación and the mainstream center-right Alianza.  Continue reading Can Bachelet win a first-round victory in Chile’s presidential election? →

Tajikistan

Imomali Rakhmon extends two-decade rule after winning sham election in Tajikistan

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Within Russia and the 14 other former Soviet republics, there are two flavors of politics.tajiktajikistantajikistan

In one set of former Soviet countries, there’s the unmistakable emergence of strengthening, if imperfect and fragile, democratic institutions.  That’s true for the three European Union states (Latvia, Lithuania and Estonia), as well as Moldova, Ukraine and Georgia, in fits and starts.

But in the other set, it’s as if the Soviet Union never crumbled, and the authoritarian model of Soviet government remains as strong as ever — in the case of Azerbaijan, which held its presidential election last month, Ilham Aliyev was overwhelmingly reelected, renewing the Aliyev family’s hold on Azerbajian since the 1970s.

So it was in Tajikistan, where Imomali Rakhmon was reelected president with nearly 87% of the vote on November 6 — Rakhmon first came to power in 1992 after the fall of the Soviet Union, and he managed to hold onto power through a brutal five-year civil war that took on elements of a proxy war between Russia and Iran, which ended only in 1997.  In recent years, Rakhmon has presided over an essentially authoritarian state.

Human rights activist Oynihol Bobonazarova was prohibited from running against Rakhmon in the recent election, clearing the way for Rakhmon’s rubber-stamp reelection.

International observers roundly criticized the vote:

Andreas Baker, presidential adviser to the OSCE’s Parliamentary Assembly and an OSCE election observer in Dushanbe, said that “while quiet and peaceful, this was an election without a real choice.”  In an interview with RFE/RL’s Tajik Service, Baker criticized Rakhmon for taking advantage of his incumbency.  “While there was extensive state media coverage of the official activities of the incumbent president, that meant that he had a significant advantage throughout the campaign,” Baker said.

Baker also mentioned irregularities in the election.  “The observation mission took note of widespread proxy voting, family voting, and group voting, as well as indications of ballot-box stuffing on election day,” he said.

Tajikistan is one of the five central Asian republics that, taken together among the former Soviet republics, have proven most impervious to democracy.  ‘Great Game’ analogies aside, it’s a region that’s attracting greater attention from the United States, China and even India — not to mention Russia’s long-standing influence.

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Tajikistan has more distance from Moscow than any of the other four Central Asian nations — it doesn’t even border Kazakhstan, let alone Russia.  It shares a long border with Afghanistan to the south, which makes it a country of some significance to the United States, especially as US military involvement in Afghanistan winds down in 2014.  It also shares a border with China’s Xinjiang province to the east.  Beijing is equally interested in Tajikistan’s stability, lest it disrupt a population of ethnic Uyghurs in Xinjiang who practice Muslim and are much closer culturally to Central Asia than to the Han Chinese culture that dominates the People’s Republic of China.

Ethnic Tajiks comprise the vast majority of the country’s population (around eight million) — they speak Tajik, a variant of the Persian language, and they largely practice Sunni Islam. A once sizable Russian minority shriveled to less than 1% of the population during the civil war, and Russian ceased to have any official role in Tajikistan four years ago.

Following the civil war, Tajikistan’s economy grew rapidly, and it continues to mark relatively high GDP growth — around 8% in 2012.  But don’t let that fool you — the high-growth is in part due to such an unimpressive starting point, and Tajikistan remains the poorest of the Central Asian republics.  Its economy is based chiefly on aluminum mining, cotton cultivation and little else — and certainly not the kind of vast oil and natural gas wealth that’s boosted Kazakhstan, Azerbaijan and Turkmenistan.  Remittances from abroad (mostly Russia) amount to up to between one-third and one-half of the country’s GDP.  Rakhmon’s regime is riddled with corruption and it hasn’t been incredibly keen on economic reforms, either, and Tajikistan is a major transit point for heroin and other opiates between Afghanistan and Russia/Europe.

Continue reading Imomali Rakhmon extends two-decade rule after winning sham election in Tajikistan →

Honduras

In Depth: Honduras

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<See below Suffragio’s preview of Honduras’s November 2013 presidential and parliamentary elections, followed by a real-time listing of all coverage of Honduran politics.>

TEGUCIGALPA — Honduras, with over eight million residents, is the second-most populous country in Central America, and its November 24 general election is arguably the most important of four upcoming Central American elections (alongside El Salvador, Costa Rica and Panamá) between November 2013 and May 2014. honduras flag icon

Hondurans will elect a new president and all 128 members of the Congreso Nacional (National Congress).  Under the Honduran constitution, the president is limited to a single four-year term, so the incumbent, Porfirio Lobo Sosa, is ineligible for reelection.

The presidential election is a one-round, plurality vote.  The two-party system that has featured in Honduran politics in the 20th century and, especially, since the return of regular elections in 1981, has meant that the winner typically achieves over 50% of the vote, though the current three-way race means that no one is likely to win with an absolute majority this time around.

The same dynamic applies with the National Congress because there’s a strong chance that no single party will emerge with an absolute majority.  A certain number of deputies are elected from each of the 18 departments of Honduras on an open-list proportional representation basis — for example, the department of Francisco Morazán, which includes Tegucigalpa, the capital, and surrounding areas, will elect 23 deputies.

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Since 1981, the conservative Partido Nacional (PN, National Party) has won three elections, including Lobo Sosa’s victory in the most recent November 2009 election. The centrist Partido Liberal (PL, Liberal Party) has won five elections, including Manuel Zelaya’s victory in the November 2005 election.  This month’s presidential election is the second since the Honduran armed forces ousted Zelaya from power in June 2009 — Zelaya had pulled the country increasingly to the left, and when he was deposed, he was attempting to revise the constitution to provide for presidential reelection.

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Juan Orlando Hernández (pictured above), who’s currently the president of the National Congress, is the candidate of the National Party.  He’s running on a platform of greater security through the development of a military police, designed to be shielded from the corrosive corruption that’s captured much of the Honduran police and the Honduran military as the country has become an increasingly popular transit point for drug traffickers.  That, in turn, has given Honduras the distinction of the world’s highest homicide rate (just over 90 per 100,000 annually).  Critics worry, however, that the military police will commit human rights abuses, especially in light of the various politically motivated murders in the past four years that have targeted not only leftist opponents of the 2009 coup, but also LGBT activists and journalists.

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His major opponent is Xiomara Castro de Zelaya (pictured above), the wife of the former president.  Both Zelayas left the Liberal Party to help form the Partido Libertad y Refundación (LIBRE, Party of Liberty and Refoundation), the first truly leftist party in Honduran political history, which emerged out of the grassroots opposition to the 2009 coup.  Since that time, LIBRE has attracted much of what used to be the left wing of the Liberal Party as well as a grab-bag of various human rights activists, including top labor, LGBT, women’s rights, indigenous and Afro-Honduran interests.  Critics argue that Xiomara’s campaign amounts to a second term for her husband.  While Xiomara’s platform is in many ways an extension of the Zelaya agenda from between 2005 and 2009, including a controversial renewed attempt to amend the Honduran constitution, she has also emphasized a community-based approach to policing, and greater spending to boost the economic fortunes of small farmers and businesses.

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Mauricio Villeda (pictured above), the candidate of the Liberal Party, by most polling surveys, is stuck in third place.  An attorney from the conservative wing of the Liberal Party, Villeda has a reputation as an honest politician, if somewhat uninspiring.  His father, Ramón Villeda Morales, served as Honduras’s president from 1957 to 1963, effecting a broadly social democratic agenda that improved public education, social welfare and public health.  The residual strength of the Liberal Party, however, and Villeda’s moderation (as between Castro de Zelaya and Hernández) means that undecided voters may turn to Villeda in the final months of the campaign.

A fourth candidate, sports announcer Salvador Nasralla, is running under the newly formed, right-wing Partido Anticorrupción (Anti-Corruption Party) and while polls showed Nasralla in the top tier of presidential candidates earlier this year, Nasralla’s support has largely dropped as more voters appear to back Hernández.

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Given that Zelaya tried to move Honduras closer to leftist regimes like Venezuela and Ecuador, thereby distancing it from a longtime alliance with the United States, the result will have significant consequences for US policy in Central America.  The United States holds a strategic air force base (Soto Cano) in Honduras and, throughout the past four years, the United States has massively increased military aid for Honduras’s anti-trafficking efforts, despite the country’s less-than-stellar human rights record.  Moreover, the June 2009 coup marked one of the first major foreign policy crises for US president Barack Obama (pictured above with Lobo Sosa) — while the United States denounced the coup and the interim government of Roberto Micheletti, US policymakers ultimately recognized the interim regime’s elections that brought Lobo Sosa to power.  No one doubts that US policymakers in 2009 weren’t incredibly upset to see the end of the Zelaya regime, and no one doubts that US policymakers would find a Zelaya resurgence in 2013 to be incredibly productive for US-Honduran relations.

Find below all of Suffragio‘s coverage of the Honduran election:

Hernández takes office with agenda already largely in place
January 27, 2014

Huffington Post: Honduran LGBT activists fear ongoing threat upon Hernández inauguration
January 24, 2014

Results of the Honduran parliamentary election — a gridlocked National Congress
December 14, 2013

How the Obama administration is failing Honduras — and Central America
December 6, 2013

A photo-op that Xiomara Castro couldn’t have pulled off
December 4, 2013

Americas Quarterly: Hernández edges toward Honduran presidency with no mandate, no majority and no money
November 26, 2013

LIVE BLOG — Honduras election results coming in: both Juan Orlando, Xiomara declare victory
November 24, 2013

McClatchy: ‘Whatever it takes’ — a look at the militarization of Honduras’s police force
November 22, 2013

An interview with Germán Leitzelar, Honduran congressman and former labor minister
November 22, 2013

An interview with Rasel Tomé, LIBRE party founder and congressional candidate
November 22, 2013

An interview with Dr. Leo Valladares, former Honduran human rights commissioner
November 22, 2013

Will the Honduran general election be conducted fairly?
November 21, 2013

LIBRE, Nasralla could leave no party with majority in Honduran Congress
November 20, 2013

Five reasons why Mauricio Villeda could still win the Honduran presidency
November 19, 2013

The New Republic: Why gun control legislation is a non-starter in Honduras
November 19, 2013

Photo essay: campaign season in Honduras
November 6, 2013

Juan Orlando versus Xiomara: an analysis of the Honduran election
November 5, 2013

Personal reflections on Roatán, the Bay Islands and the Garífuna
November 4, 2013

So what’s the big deal about Honduras’s election?
November 3, 2013

Toncontín blues: Of airports and infrastructure in Honduras
November 3, 2013

Chart of the day: Central American GDP per capita
October 29, 2013

Personal

Aftermath: Veteran’s Day/Remembrance Day on the eve of the 100th anniversary of WWI

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It’s Veteran’s Day here in the United States, it’s Remembrance Day in the United Kingdom, and accordingly, that means it’s also Armistice Day marking the end of hostilities between Germany and the Allied forces during World War I — it’s a day for remembering the sacrifices of soldiers in eras past as well as the ugly sacrifices that all war necessarily entails.poppyUK

Carl von Clausewitz wrote in his classic tract On War that politics is war by other means, and one of the motivating elements of Suffragio comes from understanding how different countries use politics (in both democratic and non-democratic states) to solve policy problems and how a country’s unique culture, economics, language and history all play a role in understanding how countries solve problems.  What’s remarkable about the world today isn’t that so many of its countries are still engaged in bloody wars, but that so many regions and countries now use politics, and not war, to solve their differences.

Next July marks the 100th anniversary of the assassination of Austro-Hungarian archduke Franz Ferdinand, the singular event that set into motion a series of domino effects that launched Europe, and then much of the rest of the world, into the ‘war to end all wars.’  Siegfried Sassoon (pictured above), a British soldier who served on the Western Front in World War I and survived the slaughter to live to age 81, became the most well-known of several WWI-era poets who came to profound disillusion over the war.

As such, I can’t think of a more appropriate way to mark the day than with his poem, ‘Aftermath.’

Have you forgotten yet?…
For the world’s events have rumbled on since those gagged days,
Like traffic checked while at the crossing of city-ways:
And the haunted gap in your mind has filled with thoughts that flow
Like clouds in the lit heaven of life; and you’re a man reprieved to go,
Taking your peaceful share of Time, with joy to spare.
But the past is just the same–and War’s a bloody game…
Have you forgotten yet?…
Look down, and swear by the slain of the War that you’ll never forget.

Do you remember the dark months you held the sector at Mametz–
The nights you watched and wired and dug and piled sandbags on parapets?
Do you remember the rats; and the stench
Of corpses rotting in front of the front-line trench–
And dawn coming, dirty-white, and chill with a hopeless rain?
Do you ever stop and ask, ‘Is it all going to happen again?’

Do you remember that hour of din before the attack–
And the anger, the blind compassion that seized and shook you then
As you peered at the doomed and haggard faces of your men?
Do you remember the stretcher-cases lurching back
With dying eyes and lolling heads–those ashen-grey
Masks of the lads who once were keen and kind and gay?

Have you forgotten yet?…
Look up, and swear by the green of the spring that you’ll never forget.

Maldives

Another election — and another delay — in the growing Maldivian constitutional crisis

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After all of the drama of the past two months, a re-run of the Maldivian presidential election essentially returned the same result as the original September 7 election.maldives

Just as in September, the winner of the November 9 election was Mohammed Nasheed, who won the first free presidential election in Maldivian history in 2008, but who was also subsequently pushed out of power in February 2012 by the country’s police and armed forces following massive protests over rising prices.  Nasheed won 46.93% of the vote, a slight increase over the 45.45% he won in the first round, but not enough to achieve the absolute majority that would avoid a runoff with the second-place candidate.

That would be Abdulla Yameen, who is the brother-in-law of Maumoon Abdul Gayoom, who served as the president of the Maldives between 1978 and 2008, and who still wields significant influence throughout the country and throughout various Maldivian institutions.  Yameen won 29.72% in the weekend vote, an increase over the 25.32% he won in September.

As in September, Gasin Ibrahim, a businessman and former finance minister in the Gayoom era, finished in third place.

But a complaint from Ibrahim over the first election caused the Maldivian supreme court to annul the results of the September election and cancel the planned runoff, despite general approval from global election monitors that the vote was largely conducted on a free and fair basis.

Scheduled originally for October and postponed until November 9, Nasheed (pictured above) and his supporters hoped that in a re-run he could win over 50% of the vote, thereby definitively returning him to the presidency.

But that didn’t happen, and the Maldivian supreme court has now postponed the runoff once again, despite the fact that it was supposed to be held on Sunday.

The problem with that delay is that a new president is supposed to be inaugurated today — the term of Mohammed Waheed, Nasheed’s former vice president, who assumed the presidency in February 2012, ends today, November 11.  That means that the Maldives will wake up tomorrow in something of a constitutional crisis — with no president, an uncertain and tentative November 16 runoff, and no fixed date for the next presidential inauguration.

That, in turn, could lead to more judicial delay or even a military intervention, both of which would be bad news for Nasheed and for Maldivian democracy, because forces loyal to Gayoom still essentially control the military and the judiciary.

There’s a chance that the runoff will be held later this week, Nasheed and/or Yameen win a clear victory, and the Maldives marks a clean transfer of power to the eventual victor.  But everything about the troubled path to Saturday’s presidential vote indicates that the path back to Maldivian democracy and the rule of law won’t be quite so easy.

El Salvador

El Salvador’s experience in dollarization

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On the way back home from Honduras, my plane landed briefly in El Salvador at San Salvador’s airport.el salvador

Not wanting to pass up a brief opportunity to try my first Salvadoran pupusa in El Salvador*, I started looking for a cash machine to withdraw some local currency.  Within seconds, however, I remembered that El Salvador switched from the colón to the US dollar 12 years ago, so of course there was no need, and I began thinking a little more about why El Salvador adopted the US dollar and whether it has seen any benefits from doing so in the past decade or so.

That decision was among the most important of the administration of Francisco Flores, El Salvador’s president between 1999 and 2004, and a member of the conservative Alianza Republicana Nacionalista (ARENA, National Republican Alliance).  Flores became one of the top US allies in the region at a time when Hugo Chávez was cementing his control on power in Venezuela.  Not only did he stand firmly with US president George W. Bush over regional affairs, he even deployed Salvadoran troops to Iraq in support of the US invasion.

Dollarization was controversial even at the time, but the policy goal was that it would reduce El Salvador’s interest rates and facilitate trade — this was in the era before the Central American Free Trade Agreement (CAFTA), which came into effect in 2009 among the United States, the Dominican Republic and four Central American countries.**

But the broader economic benefits haven’t materialized as fully as Flores might have hoped a decade ago — El Salvador’s GDP growth rates have lagged behind even some of its poorer Central American peers in the past 12 years:

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The entire Central American economy is tied heavily to the US economy due to massive trade and remittances from family members living and working in the United State.  That’s especially true for El Salvador, because many Salvadorans migrated during the brutal civil war during the 1980s (in the Washington, DC metro region, for example, Salvadorans represent the largest Latino nationality group, outpacing even Mexicans).  With around 6.3 million people, El Salvador has over three-fourths of the population of Honduras, but less than one-fifth of the area of Honduras.***

But it’s been essentially the sick man of Central America for some time, routinely underperforming Honduras, which is struggling under the weight of political polarization, trafficking-related violence and massive corruption.  El Salvador faces those problems as well, but it’s generally believed that those problems are at least slightly less drastic in El Salvador.

What’s clear is that while dollarization may (or may not) have worked for Panamá and Ecuador, the benefits have either been too small for El Salvador to realize or, worse — and more likely, dollarization has actively hampered the Salvadoran economy.

Salvadoran central bank president Carlos Acevedo earlier this year admitted that dollarization was ‘a sack of unfulfilled promises’:

Bank President Acevedo made his most recent statements (reported by Active Transparency) following the release of a government study on dollarization, which reached some rather negative conclusions. The report found that many key economic indicators, including exports and GDP fell, while inflation and interest rates rose. Dollarization has failed to shield the economy from downturns and instead made El Salvador more susceptible to instabilities in the U.S. economy, as witnessed during the 2009 recession. The Economista published an article yesterday reaching very much the same conclusions.

In his statements this month, Acevedo said dollarization was “badly designed, improvised and lacking consultation,” and that El Salvador’s fiscal performance with dollarization was the worst in sixty years. He also said the performance was so poor that even proponents of dollarization could not ignore its negative impacts.

Prices in San Salvador’s airport do seem to be higher than prices in Tegucigalpa’s airport, though perhaps the better comparison is to the swankier airport in San Pedro Sula.  But there’s definitely a sense among Salvadorans that consumer prices rose after 2001, though the reasons for that phenomenon remain an open question, even among economists.

Another IMF report from 2011, however, indicated that dollarization had reduced interest rates between 4% and 5%, thereby contributing to savings and boosting GDP by 0.25% to 0.5% annually.

It’s tempting to argue that El Salvador is suffering from the same fate as the eurozone — i.e., that El Salvador and the United States do not comprise an optimal currency zone), Salvadorans are ‘stuck’ with US monetary policy, which may not be appropriate for the Salvadoran economy, and there’s obviously no mechanism for fiscal transfers from the US federal government to the Salvadoran government.   Continue reading El Salvador’s experience in dollarization →

Honduras

Photo essay: campaign season in Honduras

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TEGUCIGALPA — It’s been a great week here in Honduras learning some more about the choice that Hondurans face on November 24, and the contextual background of Honduran history, culture and policy — and how it intersects with US policy, both present and past.honduras flag icon

But with a lull in interviews this afternoon, I have a little time to share some photos from the campaign.

From Roatán island, the largest of the Bay Islands off the north coast of Honduras, comes this small shop, with some variety of piñatas — the two at the foreground are for the conservative Partido Nacional (PN, National Party), whose presidential candidate is Juan Orlando Hernández, the current president of the Honduran National Congress; and for the leftist Partido Libertad y Refundación (LIBRE, Liberty and Refoundation Party). which supports Xiomara Castro de Zelaya, the spouse of former president Manuel Zelaya, who was ousted from power in a June 2009 coup.  Polls show that the presidential race has turned into a dead heat between Juan Orlando and Xiomara.

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On Sunday afternoon, all three major parties were out in full force.  Here are some young National Party activists driving through the streets of Valle de Ángeles, an old mining town just north of Tegucigalpa.

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Continue reading Photo essay: campaign season in Honduras →

Honduras

Juan Orlando versus Xiomara: an analysis of the Honduran election

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TEGUCIGALPA — I’ve spent some time examining why the upcoming Honduran election is so important to Central American politics regionally and, above all, to US foreign policy as it relates to Central America and Latin America.honduras flag icon

But that’s not a thoroughgoing look at the actual election campaign itself — and what to expect on November 24, when Honduras will elect not only a new president, but all 128 members of its unicameral Congreso Nacional (National Congress).

Once upon a time, you could explain Honduran politics as a two-party contest, and above all as a set of dueling  elites — the conservative Partido Nacional (PN, National Party) and the more centrist Partido Liberal (PL, Liberal Party).  Though both parties were founded in the early 20th century, they essentially follow from the familiar 19th century narrative of an aristocratic conservative elite matched against a more free-market liberal elite.  Both parties share in common an affinity for granting economic concessions to foreign interests throughout the 20th century, most notoriously to US-based banana companies (hence O. Henry’s christening Honduras as the original ‘banana republic,’ to state a cliché), and an even greater affinity for corruption.

Historically, the National Party really came into stride with the dictatorship of Tiburcio Carías Andino, who governed the country from 1932 to 1949 and Oswaldo López Arellano, who came to power via military force from 1963 to 1975 (with a brief interruption from 1971-72).  Honduras made a firm turn toward democratic elections in 1981 and, since that time, with the exception of the June 2009 that ousted Manuel Zelaya from power, Honduras has generally selected its leaders through elections, however imperfect.  The Liberal Party has elected five presidents, including Zelaya, and the National Party has elected three presidents, including the incumbent, Porfirio Lobo Sosa, who won an overwhelming victory of 56.6% against just 38.1% for Liberal candidate Elvin Santos in the most recent November 2009 election.  Those elections were held during the interim administration of Liberal caretaker president Roberto Micheletti, who uneasily served as de facto president between the June 2009 coup and January 2010.  Critics argue that they were conducted in an atmosphere of oppression, though, and many Latin American countries refused to recognize the result.

As the Honduran constitution limits the president to a single four-year term, Lobo Sosa is not eligible for reelection.

Four years later, on the eve of the 2013 presidential election, the country remains as polarized as in the immediate aftermath of the coup.  But the advent of two new political parties has transformed the Honduran political scene, destabilizing its previously cozy two-party system.  And with Honduras’s ignominious rise as the country with the world’s highest homicide rate (just over 90 per 100,000 according to UN figures for 2011), the campaign’s chief issue is security — how to reduce crime and violence that results not only from drug trafficking, but also from the police, who themselves are corrupted by drug traffickers.

The president of Honduras’s National Congress, Juan Orlando Hernández, is the candidate of the National Party, and Mauricio Villeda Bermúdez, an attorney with relatively little experience, is the candidate of the Liberal Party.

But the Frente Nacional de Resistencia Popular (FNRP, National Popular Resistance Front), which emerged in the aftermath of the Zelaya coup in protest, formed its own new political party in 2011 — the Partido Libertad y Refundación (LIBRE, Party of Liberty and Refoundation), a left-wing assembly of socialists, social democrats, indigenous and Afro-Honduran activists, human rights activists and women’s and LGBT activists.  It selected as its candidate for the presidential election the spouse of the former president, Xiomara Castro de Zelaya, and her and her husband have long since left the Liberal Party.  Moreover, sports reporter Salva Nasralla formed the center-right Partido Anticorrupción (Anti-Corruption Party), another populist right-wing party.

That’s made for a four-way race throughout much of 2013, though polls generally show a tightening of the race — Nasralla’s support has collapsed since the summer, and Villeda has stalled in third place, leaving Castro de Zelaya and Hernández in a close two-way race.  Dueling polls show either Castro de Zelaya or Hernández in the lead, but the final poll from CID-Gallup (new polls are forbidden in the final month before the election), taken between October 9 and 15, shows Hernández with 28%, Castro de Zelaya with 27%, Villeda with 17%, Nasralla with 9%, others with 6% and fully 16% undecided or for none of the candidates — it should be noted that CID-Gallup has demonstrated a National Party bias in the past.

Though polling data should guide us, and it seems clear today that it’s a two-way race, it’s not necessarily clear that it will not be a three-way race by the time Hondurans vote later this month — especially in light of the Liberal Party’s traditional voter strength and ability to raise money, and especially because Villeda could emerge as a capable third, moderate force between the two extremes of the National Party and LIBRE candidates.

Moreover, the four-way party vote means that no party is likely to secure an absolute majority in the Congress. Since 1981, Hondurans have avoided splitting their tickets — so every time Hondurans have elected a Liberal president, they’ve elected a Liberal majority to the Congress (and the same with the National Party).  This time around, though, it will be more difficult.  In a relatively complicated system of multi-member districts, voters in each of the country’s 18 departments elect each of their representatives directly.  So in Francisco Morazán, the populous department that includes and surrounds the capital Tegucigalpa, voters will have 23 votes to select from over 200 candidates. (If they miscount and elect more than 23, all of their votes will be voided; if they elect less than 23, corrupt officials haven’t been shy in the past about filling in their own preferences).

That system has virtually guaranteed that a handful of smaller parties have always received a few seats in the National Congress.  This year, it means that each of the Liberal Party, the National Party and LIBRE will win many seats, likely enough to prevent any of the three parties from amassing a majority.  That means the next president will have to form — or buy — a multiparty alliance.

Here’s a brief look at each of the three major candidates, their backgrounds and their agendas for Honduras. Continue reading Juan Orlando versus Xiomara: an analysis of the Honduran election →