194 - Elections Can Still Represent the Will of a People, Except When They Don't
Guatemala, Ecuador, Zimbabwe, Gabon
Elections are meant to demonstrate the will of voters -- how citizens and constituents feel about candidates for parliament, Congress, presidencies, and the like. Occasionally, in the developing world, elections are sufficiently free and fair that political candidates who differ from establishment or ruling party mandates gain favor, with democratic expression winning after years or decades of autocratic or semi-autocratic rule.
Such a promising result occurred Sunday in Guatemala, where Bernardo Areválo, an avowedly anti-corruption crusader and congressman, overwhelmingly triumphed (with 58 percent of the vote) over the former wife of an autocratic president (37 percent). She was the ruling establishment’s choice, but citizens expressed their antagonism to Guatemala’s persistent corruption by voting for a journalist and professor of sociology who campaigned almost entirely against continued kleptocracy. (Guatemalan judges had barred several other plausible opposition figures from contesting the election and may attempt to block Arevalo’s victory.) One recent president closed down the International Commission against Impunity in Guatemala (CICIG), a very successful UN sponsored anti-corruption commission; his two successors doubled down on lucrative rent seeking.
Arevalo, the first progressive to lead Guatemala since the end of brutal military rule in 1985, said that his governing priorities included alleviating poverty by ramping up agricultural production, the end of judicial and political persecution of government officials who seek to reduce corruption and enhance human rights, and building democracy and environmental responsibility. The new president also promised to construct roads and bridges, thereby improving his country’s lamentable infrastructure.
Meanwhile, in an Ecuador beset with narcotics trafficking, new waves of gang violence (especially from Colombia, because of drug sales), and a deteriorating economic climate, the two top winners in Sunday’s election were Luisa González (33 percent), a 45-year old woman campaigner against crime and follower of former leftist President Rafael Correa, and a center-right businessman, 35-year old banana mogul Daniel Noboa, who supports a similar platform, but prefers different methods (24 percent). Noboa, a U. S. citizen who lived there for many years, won the youth vote; Gonzalez was preferred by voters who lived well under Correa from 2007 to 2017. Ecuadorians will choose between the two in a runoff election on Oct. 15. A liberal candidate was assassinated on the eve of the polls, allegedly by a Colombian hit squad sent to silence his denunciation of their cartels.
Ecuadorians also decisively rejected continued drilling for oil in an environmentally sensitive corner of the Amazonian jungle, another radical result. Petroecuador, active there for decades, will now have a year to extricate itself from the area and begin to attempt to clean up the mess left behind. The outgoing government wanted drilling to continue; oil is Ecuador’s main legal export (36 percent of the total), with fish and farmed shrimp accounting for 24 percent, and bananas 10 percent.
In both of those Latin American countries, voters actually managed, almost for the first time in years, to exercise choice. Hence, in at least those sections of the Western Hemisphere, we can conclude that democracy is alive and well. Argentina recently had another open election, with the surprising first round victor being a strident libertarian economist and rock singer (31 percent of the vote); second was a woman conservative center right former security minister (28 percent), and third the candidate (and former economy minister) of the left-wing Peronists, who have ruled Argentina for much of the past twenty years (27 percent). The run-off election will be on October 22. Meanwhile, Argentinians experience massive inflation, currently over 114 percent annually.
Africa is a mostly very different place, electorally. Only a diminished number of countries, like Zambia and Malawi, still hold free elections. Electoral autocracies, like Zimbabwe, Uganda, Angola, the Democratic Republic of Congo, and Gabon are common.
Before yesterday’s balloting in Zimbabwe, opposition figures had been prevented from campaigning freely, the availability for inspection of the voters’ roll was late, the military carried out its usual intimidation of voters, there was little free media to comment on the government’s campaign, a recently enacted “Patriotic Bill” criminalized criticism of the government and its policies, and leading foreign observers and journalists were barred from observing the voting process.
During the day itself, 52 of 77 polling places in Harare, the country’s capital, lacked printed ballots for up to four hours; the opposition Citizens’ Coalition for Change (CCC) draws much of its support from voters in urban areas. Nelson Chamisa, 45, its leader, loudly claimed blatant voter suppression and rigging.
Eighty-year-old President Emmerson Mnangagwa ousted his boss, dictator Robert Mugabe, in 2017 with backing from military chief Constantino Chiwenga (now vice-president) and Chinese financing. He promised the end of corruption and to resuscitate Zimbabwe’s ailing economy. But inflation now rages between 77 and 175 percent annually, 90 percent of Zimbabweans lack formal sector jobs, and corruption is far worse and more crippling than it was under Mugabe (when Mnangagwa and Chiwenga also profited). Zimbabwe was once among Africa’s most prosperous places, with a well-run balanced agricultural and mining economy. Now, even with lithium and gold, it is a paradise only for kleptocrats. Yesterday’s election was hence about jobs, economic stability, and limiting the rampant corruption that has impoverished today’s Zimbabweans. A full quarter of the country’s 12 million people have fled to South Africa, Zambia, Botswana, and Europe. Nurses and midwives have gone from desolate local hospitals to jobs in Britain; schoolteachers wait on tables in South Africa.
The final results of Zimbabwe’s poll may not be processed for days. Indeed, because of chaos yesterday, the polls reopen again today. I’ll provide an update as soon as they are available, possibly as late as Monday.
Another tightly controlled African election will occur on Sunday in Gabon, a country of 2.6 million people on Africa’s west coast. Relatively wealthy thanks to petroleum (80 percent of exports), manganese, uranium, and tourism, Gabon’s vote results will likely show strong support for President Ali Bongo, especially since electoral rules were recently altered to ensure that a winner need only obtain a plurality of the votes, not as majority (as in the Latin American examples). He has been head of state since Omar Bongo, his father, died in 2009 after ruling since 1967. The current president is grooming his own son to succeed. Authorities on Gabon say that Ali Bongo is worth at least $1 billion, most of it banked overseas – profits from under the table oil payoffs. No one is richer in Gabon. Moreover, despite his wealth, 42 percent of Gabonese live below the local poverty line; 37 percent of working age Gabonese cannot find work.
There are nineteen alternative Gabonese candidates on Sunday, but nearly all of them are proteges of and stand-ins for the current president. Only a former minister of mines is a plausible opponent in a country that, just like Zimbabwe, has never known a free election since independence.
The ruling political party is organized fully to buttress what remains both an electoral autocracy and a place where dynastic succession is fundamental. (Other dynastic succession autocracies include Azerbaijan, Cambodia, Electoral Guinea, North Korea, Syria, Togo, and Turkmenistan.)
In Africa, like some remaining Latin American nations, electoral autocracies are common and surprises at the polls rare. Military takeovers are also more frequent now in Africa than they are in Latin America or Asia (barring Myanmar). Exactly how to restore real democratic behavior to all of Africa and places like Venezuela and Pakistan is a continuing puzzle, especially when European and American democracies have much less clout across the global south than they once did.