Tag Archives: coup

Egypt

ElBaradei set to become interim Egyptian prime minister in post-Morsi gamble for ‘reset’

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UPDATE: Egyptian officials are now distancing themselves from earlier reports that Mohamed ElBaradei will be Egypt’s next prime minister — that doesn’t incredibly change the analysis, though.  ElBaradei’s ties to the West, not to mention the other drawbacks mentioned below, help us understand why Egypt’s new military-backed government may have had second thoughts about ElBaradei, especially if they are hoping to bring Salafist Al-Nour Party leaders into the fold.

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Mohamed ElBaradei is set to become Egypt’s interim prime minister just four days after Mohammed Morsi was deposed as from the Egyptian presidency by the country’s armed forces.

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ElBaradei, the former director general of the International Atomic Energy Agency, is a well-known figure whose international credibility runs far deeper than that of newly-installed interim president Adly Mansour, formerly the chief justice of the Egyptian constitutional court.  His selection as prime minister will bring instant gravitas to the emerging post-Morsi regime in Egypt, at least vis-à-vis the rest of the world.

But deploying ElBaradei into power is not risk-free — for either the new government or for ElBaradei’s reputation.

The danger is that his selection won’t be enough to ameliorate the governance crisis that has now accelerated with the Egyptian military’s decision to remove Morsi.  After all, though Morsi’s government had few allies after its troubled year in office, it’s hard to believe that the Muslim Brotherhood still doesn’t command the largest bloc of supporters within Egypt, and their wrath at the military’s turn against the Muslim Brotherhood may not be soothed by the appointment of any caretaker, no matter his seniority or even-handedness.  ElBaradei’s appointment comes just a day after pro-Morsi supporters of the Muslim Brotherhood staged a day of protest — the ‘Friday of rejection’ — demanding the return of Morsi to the presidency that met with tense, sometimes violent, resistance from the Egyptian military.  It’s too early to predict that Egypt is descending into a kind of civil war — despite a troubling lynching of four Shi’a Muslims last month, the largely Sunni Egypt doesn’t really feature strong Sunni-Shi’a schisms that have propelled sectarian violence more recently in countries like Iraq and Syria, and most Egyptians, even its more conservative Islamists, hold the military in high regard, for now at least.  But there’s no guarantee that ElBaradei can keep political violence from spiraling further out of control, propelling ever more turmoil to Egyptian industry, trade and tourism.

Even if no one will miss the ineptitude of the Morsi government, ElBaradei’s new power doesn’t come imbued with much of a mandate.  Though Egypt’s post-Mubarak transition was troubled from its inception, the successful conduct of free and fair presidential elections last summer was a key milestone on Egypt’s road toward a more democratic state.  While it’s true that the anti-Morsi protests had ballooned to a size even larger than those against Mubarak in February 2011, the more relevant factor is that Mubarak was never elected in a free election the way that Morsi was only a year ago.  So while political scientists debate whether last week’s events amounted to a coup (spoiler: yes, of course it was a coup, even if the U.S. administration doesn’t use the word ‘coup’), ElBaradei and his military supporters will come to power having undermined the most visible democratic credential that Egyptians could boast since the Arab Spring began.

By contrast, though French president François Hollande remains incredibly unpopular after just one year into a five-year term,  no one seriously thinks the French military is set to remove him from office to install a center-right president in France.  Moreover, ElBaradei will become Egypt’s new leader after having pulled out of last year’s presidential race, and it was not entirely clear that ElBaradei would have won in any event.  But it would have been better for the country today if ElBaradei had remained in the race to make a full-throated case for a secular, liberal democratic Egypt and to bring the fight to Morsi on the basis of the merits of his own ideas, not on the coattails of the military’s guns.

Unlike former foreign minister and Arab Council secretary-general Amr Moussa and former air force chief Ahmed Shafiq, ElBaradei is not tainted as felool — the ‘remnants’ of the government that Hosni Mubarak led from the 1980s until 2011.  But as the Tamarod (‘Rebellion’) movement has gathered steam in its efforts to oust Morsi, ElBaradei has managed to unite a disparate coalition of anti-Morsi interests, including Moussa, much of the former military establishment, elements of the so-called ‘deep state’ and supporters of former presidential candidate Hamdeen Sabahi, whose leftist, Nasser-style nationalism nearly vaulted him into last June’s presidential runoff.  If Monsour, ElBaradei and the new interim government succeed in organizing a new presidential election, Sabahi would certainly be the frontrunner to win it (unless ElBaradei himself runs, though he’s said he’s not interested in the presidency for himself).

As ElBaradei has noted in the days leading up to and following Morsi’s forced removal, the Morsi presidency was far from perfect — ElBaradei had routinely accused Morsi of becoming a ‘pharaoh’ in office, and he mocked Morsi’s Islamist agenda by noting acidly that ‘you can’t eat sharia.’  Though Morsi won only a narrow victory last June over Shafiq, he triumphed by assembling a broader coalition that transcended his own Muslim Brotherhood supporters, and, in recognition of that reality, Morsi initially called  for a broad inclusion of diverse views in formulating policies in office.  One of his first steps in August 2012, in firing longtime army chief and defense minister Field Marshal Hussein Tantawi, and replacing him with Abdel-Fattah El-Sisi, was an incredibly successful masterstroke, temporarily at least, in marrying the political interests of the Muslim Brotherhood and the Egyptian military.  Ironically, it was El-Sisi, who owed his position as commander-in-chief of the Egyptian armed forces to Morsi, who green-lighted the action that toppled Morsi.

But as Bassem Sabry explained in illuminating detail on Thursday in Al-Monitor, the clear point at which Morsi lost control over the country was his ill-fated decision last November to push through a vote on the country’s new constitution.   Continue reading ElBaradei set to become interim Egyptian prime minister in post-Morsi gamble for ‘reset’ →

Venezuela

Venezuela marks coup anniversary in leadup to election

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CARACAS, Venezuela — On April 11, 2002, a large band of opposition supporters marched on Miraflores — the presidential palace — were met by chavista supporters, and exchanged gunfire meters from where Hugo Chávez and his advisers were sitting. A handful of protestors died and ultimately, in the following hours, Hugo Chávez left power for 47 hours. Right-wing businessman Pedro Cardona shortly took occupation of Miraflores, though his suspension of the National Assembly and failure to secure the support of Venezuela’s army slowly isolated him, and the Venezuelan army itself restored Chávez to power on April 14.Venezuela Flag Icon

On April 11, 2013, exactly 11 years later, Chávez’s supporters, having freshly mourned their fallen leader last month, will mark the final day of the snap presidential campaign in a massive rally for his successor, acting president Nicolás Maduro, throughout Caracas.

I don’t want to spend too much time rehashing what’s now become history, legend, and political fodder. It’s famously difficult to know just exactly what happened back in 2002, whether it was technically a full golpe (a coup d’etat) or not, the full role of the army in both pushing Chávez (briefly) from power and restoring him, who opened gunfire on whose orders, or even how many people died. But it came in a particularly tense year of transition, and it’s generally accepted that the coup — much like the general strike later that year — came as a result of Chávez’s ultimately successful attempt to assert control over the state-owned oil company, Petroleós de Venezuela, S.A. (PDVSA).

The quintessential film on the subject, despite its pro-Chávez leanings, is a documentary, The Revolution Will Not Be Televised, shot by an Irish film crew that just happened to be in Miraflores working on a piece about Chávez when the April 11 events rapidly spun out of control.

Another account — one that I think gets closer to the heart of the matter, despite the fact that it’s written by someone who has decidedly anti-Chávez sentiments, comes from Francisco Toro, one of the authors of the Caracas Chronicles blog, which posits that both Chávez and his opponents, having played brinksmanship games for months, finally went too far, leaving the Venezuelan army in the middle to keep both sides from escalating the bloodshed that day.

Though it’s eleven years later, and there haven’t been any coup or near-coup attempts since, it’s not without some irony that the anniversary hangs over Venezuela tensely three days before voters decide whether to reward chavismo with another six years in office or to turn to opposition alternative Henrique Capriles.

There’s been some discussion in the Venezuelan media over whether the armed forces are being deployed to help get out the vote for the governing Partido Socialista Unido de Venezuela (PSUV, or United Socialist Party of Venezuela), though military officials have backtracked from that claim in recent days. Capriles in an interview with El Universal earlier this week forcefully argued that Maduro and the PSUV should respect the election results, and cautioned that the armed forces would be responsible to ensure a peaceful transition. Though Chávez managed to commingle politics into every aspect of the state — from PDVSA to the central bank to state government — the military has retained relatively more of a patina of independence from politics than other state institutions.

Polls, which are not quite accurate in Venezuela, gave Maduro an edge in the leadup to the election, but that doesn’t mean Capriles is hopeless — he won a tough reelection as the governor of Miranda state in an otherwise dismal set of regional elections in December 2012 after placing just 11% behind Chávez in the October 2012 election — a better showing than any of Chávez’s rivals stretching back to 1998. Maduro is no Chávez, and since the 2012 presidential election, Venezuela’s economy has only gotten worse, and there’s been no appreciable improvement in the standard of living, some of the continent’s worst crime and power shortages throughout the country.

Because everyone assumes that Maduro will somehow find enough votes to win the election, no one really knows how easily Maduro and the chavistas would transfer power. Continue reading Venezuela marks coup anniversary in leadup to election →

Paraguay

As Lugo fades, Paraguay enters diplomatic purgatory

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It’s been almost three weeks since Paraguay’s congress voted to impeach and oust its president, Fernando Lugo.

The whole affair has been odd from the beginning, given that it came just 10 months before the next presidential election, and it has left regional trade blocs like Mercosur and the Organization of American States in an awkward position.

On the one hand, the impeachment was conducted in accordance with Paraguayan law — this wasn’t a military coup, but an overwhelming vote duly taken by its congress. And the vote wasn’t even close — it garnered support from not just the Partido Colorado, which Lugo defeated in 2008 to end 61 continuous years of Colorado rule, but also from the center-right Partido Liberal Radical Auténtico (the “Authentic Liberal Radical Party” or PLRA) to which Lugo’s vice president, one-time ally and, now, Paraguay’s new president, Federico Franco, belonged.

On the other hand, it’s easy to find a lot amiss with the affair — debate lasted for just two hours before the final vote, hardly the kind of constitutional due process you would expect from such a weighty matter as impeachment.  For that matter, the cause for impeachment wasn’t abuse of power, corruption, nothing more scandalous than “poor performance.” It’s an ominous sign for a country just establishing democratic norms, and it sets a dangerous precedent for the future.

From the outset, more conservative regimes saw the move as constitutionally permissible; more leftist regimes immediately saw a soft coup.

So Mercosur, bolstered by center-left Brazil and Argentina (each of which has a special distaste for extraconstitutional regime change) immediate moved to suspend Paraguay through at least next April’s presidential election.  In a further slap, Mercosur has fast-tracked the accession of Venezuela, whose president Hugo Chavez has been a particularly vocal supporter of Lugo, into the trading bloc.

Meanwhile, the OAS has taken a more tentative approach — its secretary-general José Miguel Insulza has said a suspension would only cause more difficulty for Paraguay.  Continue reading As Lugo fades, Paraguay enters diplomatic purgatory →

Paraguay

Lugo’s impeachment in Paraguay a setback for the South American left

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Paraguay is an oft-forgotten, landlocked country in the heart of South America with just 6.5 million people and one of the lowest GDP per capita on the continent (it’s half of Peru’s and just one-third of Venezuela’s), and it has only a very shaky foundation in democratic institutions. 

So it was with some alarm on Friday that its president Fernando Lugo was impeached and removed from office four years into his term on the basis of “poor performance” after a botched police raid resulted in 17 deaths last week:

Speaking on national television on Thursday, Mr Lugo said he would not resign, but “face the consequences” of the trial. He accused his opponents of carrying out an “express coup d’etat”.

But the Paraguayan chamber of deputies voted rapidly and overwhelmingly in favor of impeachment, and the Paraguayan senate followed with a move to remove Lugo on Friday.

Lugo’s vice president, Federico Franco, has now assumed the presidency and has announced he will serve out the rest of Lugo’s term until the April 2013 presidential election, although Mercosur has not recognized Franco’s takeover and other Latin American leaders have rejected Lugo’s impeachment as a coup d’etat.  The United States has urged caution, but the key question for Paraguay is whether the Organization of American States and the Union of South American Nations will take a united front against the impeachment — and Franco is taking efforts to keep the impeachment from turning into an international crisis.

Lugo’s removal gained nearly unanimous support in the Paraguayan Congress, from not only the opposition Partido Colorado, but also from the center-right Partido Liberal Radical Auténtico (the “Authentic Liberal Radical Party” or PLRA) of Lugo’s vice president, a one-time ally.  Nonetheless, both Dionisio Borda, the finance minister, and Jorge Corvalán, the president of Paraguay’s central bank resigned on Saturday.

Given that the most vociferous criticism of the impeachment is coming from countries with more leftist governments, including Ecuador, Argentina and the Dominican Republic, it seems more likely that Latin American officials will split on the basis of ideological differences — more leftist officials will be much more likely to view the impeachment as a coup and more right-wing officials will view the impeachment as legitimate.

Lugo ran for election four years ago chiefly on a platform of redistributing land to Paraguayan peasants, so it is ironic that his impeachment stems directly from a botched eviction of landless tenants by police that resulted in 17 deaths.

His election in April 2008 sent shockwaves throughout Latin America and in a country that has often seemed trapped in a 19th century political dynamic  — the name of the Colorado Party, the ruling party of strongman Alfredo Stroessner, who governed the country from 1954 to 1989, even harkens back to the colorado-blanco dynamic of the dramatic 19th century fights between rural, conservative landowners and urban, liberal reformers that split much of Latin America throughout the region’s first century of post-colonial independence.  The Colorado party, still adjusting to Paraguay’s nascent democracy, had been in power for 61 years in 2008 when Lugo won the presidential election. Continue reading Lugo’s impeachment in Paraguay a setback for the South American left →

Mali

Malian coup works out well for candidate and now interim president Traoré

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When Dioncounda Traoré decided to run in Mali’s April 29 presidential election, he had no idea he would be sworn in as president — on April 12, nonetheless.

But the president of the national assembly and president of the Alliance for Democracy and Progress found himself in precisely that position as he was sworn in as interim president Thursday, following a coup on March 21 that saw the removal of Amadou Toumani Touré, who had served as president of the west African country since 2000 and was set to step down in advance of the planned presidential election.

In the wake of general international condemnation and further unrest in the north of Mali — northern Tuareg rebels, encouraged by the opportunity of the coup, declared their own nation of Azawad last week — coup leaders stepped down in favor of Traoré, who has been tasked with organizing new elections within 40 days.

Captain Amadou Haya Sanogo, who organized the coup from within the military as a result of frustration with the relatively soft-touch approach of Touré’s government to the northern uprising, will likely go down in Malian history as one of its most incompetent actors, having served as a catalyst for accelerating the very movement he hoped his coup would squash.  The coup simultaneously transformed the image of his nation from a poster child of democratic stability into an international pariah.  Pretty staggering for less than a month.  It will be up to Traoré to begin the process of cleaning up that mess. Continue reading Malian coup works out well for candidate and now interim president Traoré →

Mali

Good golly, Miss Mali

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Perhaps this was inevitable, given that the coup leaders who deposed President Amadou Toumani Touré have wavered with indecisiveness in the face of international and regional backlash since taking power on March 21.

But the National Movement for the Liberation of Azawad declared the north’s independence Friday, making an already tense situation worse.

It is ironic to note that Captain Amadou Haya Sanogo led the original Mali coup out of frustration that the current administration was not doing enough to retard the progress of the Tuareg rebels, but it seems as if the latest move has somewhat stymied the coup’s newly installed government, Comité national pour le redressement de la démocratie et la restauration de la démocratie et la restauration de l’état (“CNRDRE”).

The Mali dynamic has featured some of the same north-south tensions as Sudan — but in reverse: in Mali, the northern, nomadic Tuaregs have long complained of mistreatment and a lack of support from Bamako and the south, where the majority of Malians live.  While the overwhelming majority of Mali is Muslim, the Tuaregs have more in common with Algeria and Libya than with southern Mali, which has correspondingly more cultural ties to other west African Francophone countries like Senegal.

With plenty of access to arms from the recent campaign in Libya to Mali’s north and the example of South Sudan to Mali’s east, it is not exactly surprising that this could have happened.  Unlike with South Sudan, however, the fear among the United States and Europe that al-Qaeda and other Islamic fundamentalist groups could turn the north into a terrorist haven, don’t expect the international community to leap at the opportunity to recognize the new nation of Azawad anytime soon.

So it’s looking like Mali is even further removed from holding a new presidential election anytime soon, which was originally scheduled for April 29.

Mali

Malian coup may complicate election plans

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The revolution may or may not be televised, but I wouldn’t get my heart set on that Malian presidential election later next month — to think this is what happens when the ruling president steps down without triggering a potential Senegalese-style constitutional crisis.

It appears for now that rebel soldiers, under the banner of the National Committee for the Establishment of Democracy, have brought the reign of President Amadou Toumani Toure to a premature end over disagreements with the way the army has prosecuted its response to the Tuareg-led rebellion in Mali’s north.

The soldiers appear to have seized control of the presidential palace and the state television station.

It looks like Mali will not be getting the world’s first Mormon head of state.