Tag Archives: fraud

Afghanistan’s election becomes a farce — and a US policy disaster

kerryandtheafghans

It’s hard, exactly, to pinpoint the exact moment when Afghanistan’s presidential election became a complete absurdity.afghanistan flag

With a US-brokered audit process of the election already behind schedule, and with outgoing president Hamid Karzai declaring September 2 as the swearing-in day for the country’s next leader, the election process suffered yet another blow on Wednesday when Abdullah Abdullah, a former foreign minister and the winner of the election’s first round, angrily pulled out of a UN-led audit process that’s designed to validate the results of Afghanistan’s June presidential election. 

As next week’s deadline approaches and the United Nations continues the vote audit, Abdullah is expected to meet with his rival, Ashraf Ghani Ahmadzai (pictured above, center, with Kerry, left, and Abdullah, right) as well as US officials who are desperate to bring the two candidates into a national unity government.

Despite the last-minute talks, it’s hard to think of a recent national election that has been so thoroughly botched — with such dire consequences for the country’s future.  

In 2014 alone, Egypt and Syria held non-credible presidential votes and parliamentary elections in Iraq and Libya were overshadowed by the breakdown of any semblance of national order. 

It’s been a difficult summer for US president Barack Obama and US foreign policy interests — the ongoing tensions between Ukraine and Russia threaten Europe’s security, the rise of the Islamic State (IS/ISIS/ISIL) in Sunni Iraq and Syria goaded US military strikes in retaliation, and Israel’s summer war against Hamas in the Gaza Strip destroyed two years of efforts by US secretary of state John Kerry to pursue an Israeli-Palestinian peace deal. 

But Afghanistan’s growing political and security crisis represents a fourth major foreign policy headache for Kerry and the rest of the Obama administration.

* * * * *

RELATED: Afghanistan hopes for calm as key presidential election approaches

RELATED: Is Ghani’s Afghan preliminary electoral victory a fraud?

RELATED: Will Kerry’s deal with Afghanistan’s
presidential contenders work?

* * * * *

Though the audit is only slightly more than two-thirds complete, a premature inauguration of either candidate next week could splinter Afghanistan on ethnic lines, giving the next presidential administration virtually no hope of uniting a country already struggling to combat a Taliban-led insurgency.

Months of post-election accusations between the Ghani and Abdullah camps have polarized Afghanistan more than ever. What’s so staggering is that Afghanistan’s election season started off on such promising terms.  Continue reading Afghanistan’s election becomes a farce — and a US policy disaster

Sánchez Cerén narrowly leads Salvadoran presidential vote

SSCortiz

Though El Salvador’s vice president, Salvador Sánchez Cerén, was expected to win the March 9 presidential runoff, the result was so tight that no winner has yet been formally declared, pending a recount of the too-close-to-call election.el salvador

Sánchez Cerén (pictured above, left, with running mate Óscar Ortiz, right) almost won the presidency outright in the first round on February 2, taking 48.92% of the vote, a nearly double-digit lead over his challenger, San Salvador mayor Norman Quijano, who won just 38.95%:

salvador copy

Sánchez Cerén hopes to extend the rule of the Frente Farabundo Martí para la Liberación Nacional (FMLN, Farabundo Martí National Liberation Front), the one-time guerrilla group that is today El Salvador’s major leftist political party.  In 2009, Mauricio Funes, a former journalist, led the FMLN to its first-ever electoral victory, ending nearly two decades of post-civil war rule by the center-right Alianza Republicana Nacionalista (ARENA, Nationalist Republican Alliance).

On Sunday, however, provisional results show that Sánchez Cerén won just 50.11% of the vote, narrowly leading Quijano, who had 49.89% of the vote:

salvadoranrunoff

How did this happen?

It wasn’t too difficult to realize, even before February 2, that the runoff vote would tighten.  That’s because in the first round, Sánchez Cerén easily consolidated the FMLN vote, while Quijano had to compete against Elías Antonio ‘Tony’ Saca, a conservative who served as president from 2004 to 2009.  Saca, following his presidency, was kicked out of ARENA, largely over allegations of corruption stemming from his presidential administration and his future presidential ambitions.  Accordingly, Saca led a third-party coalition against both Quijano and Sánchez Cerén in 2014.

Though Saca won a relatively disappointing 11.44% in the first round, it seemed clear that Quijano would win the majority of Saca supporters in the second round.  Taken together, the combined Quijano-Saca support totaled  50.39%, proving in the first round that there’s a basis for a center-right, conservative electoral coalition.  If Quijano were able to win almost all of the former Saca voters and/or win over a few first-round FMLN voters, he could leapfrog Sánchez Cerén and into the presidency.  Sunday’s provisional result seems to indicate that, though Quijano consolidated much of the conservative vote, it still wasn’t quite enough (though let’s wait for the full recount). Continue reading Sánchez Cerén narrowly leads Salvadoran presidential vote

Hernández edges toward Honduras presidency with no mandate, no majority and no money

juanbaloon

I write today at Americas Quarterly that even as Juan Orlando Hernández closes in on the Honduran presidency, he’ll do so with nearly historic obstacles to governing Honduras — in short, he’ll take over the leadership of his countryhonduras flag icon with no mandate, no majority and no money:

In light of Honduras’s single-round, first-past-the-post electoral system, [leftist party] LIBRE’s advent made it a near-certainty that the next president would win with less than an absolute majority. If Hernández wins with just 34 percent of the vote, it will mean that nearly two-thirds of Honduran voters rejected his approach.  Both [opponent Xiomara] Castro de Zelaya and fourth-place candidate Salvador Nasralla (who’s polling a higher-than-expected 15.64 percent)—a populist sports broadcaster who started a rival right-wing “Anti-Corruption Party”—have already alleged fraud.  It’s too soon to know if those accusations have any substance, but there’s certainly enough doubt—not least of all due to the National Party’s disputed 2012 primary elections—to take them seriously.

But even if it turns out that Honduras’s election was “free” in a technical sense, there’s wider doubt that it was a truly fair election.  LIBRE candidates, along with journalists and various other activists, have been killed, attacked and harassed with alarming frequency since the 2009 coup.  On Saturday night, two LIBRE leaders were assassinated near Tegucigalpa, Honduras’ capital. They weren’t the first LIBRE activists to be killed in Honduras and they won’t be the last—with little apparent ability to combat the world’s highest homicide rate, the Honduran state is unable to investigate murderers who can kill with impunity.

I argue further that it will also be difficult for Hernández to form (or buy) an alliance if, as expected, a four-way parliamentary election leads to the result that no party wins an absolute majority in the Congreso Nacional (National Congress):

LIBRE is certain to oppose Hernández at every step, especially if Castro de Zelaya digs in with her refusal to concede the election and especially if she has good reason for protest. Even without Castro de Zelaya, the new party seems to have sparked a genuine political realignment that isn’t likely to disappear with one election or the political stardom of the Zelayas.

With a disappointing third-place finish, the Partido Liberal (PL, Liberal Party) is likely to want to win back many of the supporters that left it to support the Zelayas and LIBRE.  There’s a strong argument that the last thing that the Liberals will want to do is join forces with Hernández at a time when their party’s raison d’être is under siege — instead, the Liberals would be smart to draw contrasts with Hernández.

Notably, Hernández pushed through the centerpiece of his campaign, a controversial military police force, in August, when his conservative Partido Nacional (National Party) held 71 of the Congress’s 128 seats.  Even if the National Party somehow wins an unlikely majority when the results of Sunday’s parliamentary vote are known, Hernández certainly won’t have 71 seats — it’s more likely that he’ll have a caucus in the 50s.  That comes at a time when it’s almost certain he’ll seek a loan from the International Monetary Fund, with terms that will impose spending limits on Hernández’s administration:

Honduras’ precarious finances will also clip Hernández’ wings. With a nearly 4 percent budget deficit in 2012 and a public debt of 35 percent of GDP, Honduras can barely pay its public employees.  Financial strains have also limited the ability of both the national and municipal governments to pay police and military officials enough to discourage collusion with drug traffickers.  Financing a new military police force, too, means less money for reducing poverty and unemployment, building roads and hospitals, and crafting economic policy to reduce income inequality in Honduras.

 

Despite likely fraud, AMLO, #YoSoy132 protests seem destined to fail

It’s been over half a month since Enrique Peña Nieto’s victory in the presidential election on July 1, but the protests against the electoral fraud alleged to have been committed by his party, the Partido Revolucionario Institucional (PRI), continue, however haltingly, especially in Mexico City.

Although the street protests are mostly at the impetus of a student protest movement called #YoSoy132 — it’s a long backstory, but think of it as sort of an ‘Occupy Zocalo’ movement, formed to call for greater electoral integrity and the elimination of corruption in Mexican government.  To be fair, the group has kept up a lot of pressure on the PRI both before and now after the election, especially in light of a scandal, revealed by The Guardian, suggesting a too-cozy relationship between Peña Nieto and Televisa, a top television news source in Mexico.

To be sure, it’s great that #YoSoy132 and other watchdogs will be watching the PRI like a hawk.  Notwithstanding its 12 years in the wilderness, it did control Mexico in a semi-authoritarian grip for seven decades (although I have argued that Mexico’s democratic and civil society institutions are sufficiently robust to withstand the PRI’s return to power, and the PRI may succeed where recent presidents Vicente Fox and Felipe Calderón have failed — in tax reform, on energy reform and on ending Mexico’s war on drug cartels).

Meanwhile, the runner-up in the July 1 presidential race, Andrés Manuel López Obrador (commonly, “AMLO” in the press), the candidate of the Partido de la Revolución Democrática (PRD), has cried foul play — he’s filed a complaint to invalidate the election with Mexico’s elections institute. He’s alleged that the PRI bought votes in the 2012 election and exceeded spending limits.  He’s probably right.

But unfortunately, he lost by between 6% and 7% of the vote.  A lot of folks in Mexico acknowledge that the PRI may have bought a lot of votes in the recent election and probably exceeded spending limits — even the Partido Acción Nacional (PAN), which currently controls the presidency, admits this. But there’s really no substantive legal recourse (just a post-facto fine). The relevant fact is that no one thinks Peña Nieto’s margin of victory is small enough for this to have actually mattered.  Continue reading Despite likely fraud, AMLO, #YoSoy132 protests seem destined to fail