Haiti's election outcome impossible to predict
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Haiti's election outcome impossible to predict
Haiti's election outcome impossible to predict
November 27, 2010
Lucas Oleniuk/Toronto Star
PORT-AU-PRINCE—Christian Lundi is almost painfully gaunt and several teeth short of a smile. At 64, he doesn’t come across as a likely protester, a typical militant.
But here he is in the urine-soaked tent city of Champs de Mars, with a presidential election set for Sunday, ready to march as long as he can in the midday sun.
He used to work at the state-owned port authority, until he lost that job 10 years ago in a spate of privatizations. The government promised him and hundreds of other state employees 36 months’ pay as severance.
It never came. A bitter Lundi hasn’t worked since.
So he’s marching, at least as the parade begins, in what will become a two-hour protest through the capital’s streets with escalating vandalism, until the Haitian National Police finally arrive with tear gas.
Nearby, a man draped in the Haitian flag is spray-painting slogans denouncing Haitian President René Préval, the United Nations mission here (MINUSTAH) and the apparent link between foreign troops and a cholera epidemic that has killed more than 1,300.
“ABA MINISTA = KOLERA,” reads one, and underneath, with no need of translation: “FÒK MINISTALE.”
This is protest as moving stew — just about any grievance added to what is, nominally, a rally of state workers, the anger easily shifting among targets and politicians.
When an SUV passes close by, its windows plastered with posters of “Titid” —Haiti’s twice-ousted president, Jean-Bertrand Aristide, known as “the little priest” — it becomes an instant cue for a breakaway group.
They’re soon ripping down the yellow and green banners of Jude Célestin, Préval’s handpicked successor, setting them aflame in the street.
Such is Haiti’s roiling electorate, the one that now wants to punish someone, something, after 10 post-quake months of scarcely alleviated misery.
This is the electorate whose frustration no fewer than 19 presidential candidates now hope to channel, conquer or champion in a race that will also elect 99 deputies and 10 senators.
And the only certainty, apart from violence, is that the election has become such an unpredictable horse race that a runoff between the top contenders now looms in January — almost exactly a year after an earthquake devastated the country.
With a Comme Il Faut menthol cigarette in one, extended hand, Michelle Bayard Gehy is performing a kind of triangulation exercise with the other, slapping an ashtray down on a glass table at various points.
Bayard Gehy is an old hand at politics. She was one of the campaign managers for Marc Bazin, the former World Bank executive whose presidential run in 1990 proved no match for the tide of Aristide.
She’s also done a couple of public relations stints working for Haiti’s now-controversial electoral council, which rejected 14 would-be presidential candidates, including Haitian-American singer Wyclef Jean.
But Bayard Gehy is sitting out this election. She never thought it would actually go ahead, and found it confused and chaotic when it did.
Not that this is an extreme variation from the Haitian norm, which is where the shifting ashtray comes in, its movements meant to mimic the calculations of powerful political bosses in the regions, whose allegiances shift.
“These guys in the provinces don’t give a damn who’s president,” says Bayard Gehy. “Nobody can control them. You don’t know what they will do.”
What they want is easy: access to the central government in Port-au-Prince, some ability to tap its largesse. So they hedge their bets, supporting this president but that senator and these other deputies, extracting promises.
This is just one complication in a presidential race filled with unpredictability, and a presidential runoff scheduled for Jan. 16 if no one secures more than 50 per cent of the votes.
The latest polls have Célestin, a previously unknown technocrat, falling slightly behind Mirlande Manigat, a 70-year-old former first lady with a Sorbonne education. “All the women’s organizations will vote for Manigat,” says Bayard Gehy.
But neither Célestin nor Manigat are pulling in much more than a third of the electorate in polls, and support for two spoilers has lately spiked: Jean-Henry Céant, whose election handouts boldly feature Aristide’s portrait; and Michel Martelly, a.k.a. “Sweet Micky,” the former bad boy of Haitian music known to perform in diapers and swill rum onstage.
Bayard Geby, grown cycnical by experience, thinks that if the results are too close — if Célestin doesn’t secure a prominent lead in the balloting — the announced numbers will almost certainly differ from the actual ones, no matter the presence of foreign observers.
Hundreds of thousands of paper ballots need to be counted, and the preliminary results won’t be announced until Dec. 7, with a final tally scheduled for Dec. 20.
The last thing Célestin wants is a runoff he would almost certainly lose — the kind of runoff Préval was supposed to face in 2006, before the electoral commission let him simply claim the presidency amid escalating violence.
“The government will arrange everything,” says Bayard Gehy. “They’ll find a way.
“That’s easy in Haiti. Sometimes there is no electricity.”
To the loudspeakered beat of kompas tunes, Haiti’s take on merengue, a few thousand Michel Martelly supporters have been dancing, chanting and marching for an hour, from a tent city in Pétionville to the heart of the Delmas neighbourhood.
And then it happens. Suddenly among them is Sweet Micky himself, wearing jeans and a white T-shirt.
The crowd turns ecstatic as Martelly clambers on top of the sound system stacked in the back of a battered pick-up truck and starts singing. “Ou la la, ou ou la la . . . ”
A sea of campaign T-shirts is singing and swaying along as 49-year-old Sweet Micky gyrates to his signature tunes.
Martelly’s late-campaign slogan is “Tèt Kale” — which literally means shaved head, or the bald one, but metaphorically conjures something clean, out in the open.
For days, his recorded messages promising change have been pumping into the ears of cellphone subscribers.
Sweet Micky is the reason Martine Pierre-Louis had, on this day, lined up at 4 a.m. in front of the Pétionville police station to collect the electoral card allowing her to vote. And why, six hours later, she was still there with perhaps 100 people ahead of her and untold hundreds behind.
An asthmatic with a little puffer in hand, Pierre-Louis just wants change, or the hope of change, something she figures only Martelly can bring.
It’s easy to find Haitians who similarly adore Sweet Micky, hard to find even opponents without a soft spot for the guy. Bayard Gehy, who’s voting for Manigat, says she’d be among the first to leap up and give Micky a kiss if he walked into the room.
“Everybody likes him,” she says, “but he doesn’t have the logistics on the ground.”
By which she means money. Rule of thumb: the top candidates will each spend $1 million on election day alone, just to pay and feed campaign workers and the scrutineers at polling stations.
The Johnnie Walker is flowing just fine at the Kinam Hotel in Pétionville. This more than suits Patrick Elie, who at 60 and diagnosed with cancer seems to relish his role as raconteur as much as his continuing power to provoke.
He has history, which is what you’d expect from a biochemist educated in Canada (Sherbrooke, McGill) who just happens to have spent years as an confidante of Aristide (now in exile in South Africa) and, more controversially, as the guy running Aristide’s security operation in the 1990s.
This would be the role that, more or less, led to a two-year stint in an American prison on weapons trafficking charges. The punchline of this story is that, when U.S. prosecutors wanted him to strike a deal and point fingers at those who’d committed political murders in Haiti, Elie demanded to know in return the real culprits in the assassinations of John F. Kennedy and Martin Luther King.
This exchange ended badly.
“I’ve made all the mistakes that could have been made,” he says. “I was in gun-running, all kinds of stupidity.”
The other thing you need to know is that Elie is married to Préval’s sister, Préval having been an Aristide ally in a previous life — the kind of three degrees of separation trick that Haiti seems to have raised to an art form.
But Elie doesn’t have much time for Préval’s chosen one, Célestin, the newcomer. “When did Célestin ever figure in the political life of this country? When did he show up?”
Elie is certain that this time, there will be a presidential runoff, one that Manigat will win. Not that this will signify much.
“I don’t believe this election has any true sense,” he says. “It is just empty. All we are seeing is egos and personalities on the scene. It’s about personal ambitions and it’s about who’s going to get the largest part of the loot of reconstruction, not about society.
“We must have elections but we must have elections that are loaded with meaning.”
In Elie’s hands, the socialist torch has scarcely dimmed. He still divides Haitian society into two camps, starting with the 30 per cent who don’t really trust democracy, or at least not one dominated by Haiti’s illiterate masses.
Aristide was, to Elie, less a conventional leader than a symbol of how the downtrodden poor — the other 70 per cent—had finally arrived on the political scene.
They once did so en masse, overwhelmingly throwing their lot in with Aristide, the ghost who still stalks Haiti. Now they’re ceaselessly divided into warring camps, in this election as in the last, their anger and hopes splintered in too many directions.
“It breaks my heart,” says Elie. “And yet I’m still optimistic. We’ve just got to go through that. It’s part of growing up.”
November 27, 2010
Lucas Oleniuk/Toronto Star
PORT-AU-PRINCE—Christian Lundi is almost painfully gaunt and several teeth short of a smile. At 64, he doesn’t come across as a likely protester, a typical militant.
But here he is in the urine-soaked tent city of Champs de Mars, with a presidential election set for Sunday, ready to march as long as he can in the midday sun.
He used to work at the state-owned port authority, until he lost that job 10 years ago in a spate of privatizations. The government promised him and hundreds of other state employees 36 months’ pay as severance.
It never came. A bitter Lundi hasn’t worked since.
So he’s marching, at least as the parade begins, in what will become a two-hour protest through the capital’s streets with escalating vandalism, until the Haitian National Police finally arrive with tear gas.
Nearby, a man draped in the Haitian flag is spray-painting slogans denouncing Haitian President René Préval, the United Nations mission here (MINUSTAH) and the apparent link between foreign troops and a cholera epidemic that has killed more than 1,300.
“ABA MINISTA = KOLERA,” reads one, and underneath, with no need of translation: “FÒK MINISTALE.”
This is protest as moving stew — just about any grievance added to what is, nominally, a rally of state workers, the anger easily shifting among targets and politicians.
When an SUV passes close by, its windows plastered with posters of “Titid” —Haiti’s twice-ousted president, Jean-Bertrand Aristide, known as “the little priest” — it becomes an instant cue for a breakaway group.
They’re soon ripping down the yellow and green banners of Jude Célestin, Préval’s handpicked successor, setting them aflame in the street.
Such is Haiti’s roiling electorate, the one that now wants to punish someone, something, after 10 post-quake months of scarcely alleviated misery.
This is the electorate whose frustration no fewer than 19 presidential candidates now hope to channel, conquer or champion in a race that will also elect 99 deputies and 10 senators.
And the only certainty, apart from violence, is that the election has become such an unpredictable horse race that a runoff between the top contenders now looms in January — almost exactly a year after an earthquake devastated the country.
With a Comme Il Faut menthol cigarette in one, extended hand, Michelle Bayard Gehy is performing a kind of triangulation exercise with the other, slapping an ashtray down on a glass table at various points.
Bayard Gehy is an old hand at politics. She was one of the campaign managers for Marc Bazin, the former World Bank executive whose presidential run in 1990 proved no match for the tide of Aristide.
She’s also done a couple of public relations stints working for Haiti’s now-controversial electoral council, which rejected 14 would-be presidential candidates, including Haitian-American singer Wyclef Jean.
But Bayard Gehy is sitting out this election. She never thought it would actually go ahead, and found it confused and chaotic when it did.
Not that this is an extreme variation from the Haitian norm, which is where the shifting ashtray comes in, its movements meant to mimic the calculations of powerful political bosses in the regions, whose allegiances shift.
“These guys in the provinces don’t give a damn who’s president,” says Bayard Gehy. “Nobody can control them. You don’t know what they will do.”
What they want is easy: access to the central government in Port-au-Prince, some ability to tap its largesse. So they hedge their bets, supporting this president but that senator and these other deputies, extracting promises.
This is just one complication in a presidential race filled with unpredictability, and a presidential runoff scheduled for Jan. 16 if no one secures more than 50 per cent of the votes.
The latest polls have Célestin, a previously unknown technocrat, falling slightly behind Mirlande Manigat, a 70-year-old former first lady with a Sorbonne education. “All the women’s organizations will vote for Manigat,” says Bayard Gehy.
But neither Célestin nor Manigat are pulling in much more than a third of the electorate in polls, and support for two spoilers has lately spiked: Jean-Henry Céant, whose election handouts boldly feature Aristide’s portrait; and Michel Martelly, a.k.a. “Sweet Micky,” the former bad boy of Haitian music known to perform in diapers and swill rum onstage.
Bayard Geby, grown cycnical by experience, thinks that if the results are too close — if Célestin doesn’t secure a prominent lead in the balloting — the announced numbers will almost certainly differ from the actual ones, no matter the presence of foreign observers.
Hundreds of thousands of paper ballots need to be counted, and the preliminary results won’t be announced until Dec. 7, with a final tally scheduled for Dec. 20.
The last thing Célestin wants is a runoff he would almost certainly lose — the kind of runoff Préval was supposed to face in 2006, before the electoral commission let him simply claim the presidency amid escalating violence.
“The government will arrange everything,” says Bayard Gehy. “They’ll find a way.
“That’s easy in Haiti. Sometimes there is no electricity.”
To the loudspeakered beat of kompas tunes, Haiti’s take on merengue, a few thousand Michel Martelly supporters have been dancing, chanting and marching for an hour, from a tent city in Pétionville to the heart of the Delmas neighbourhood.
And then it happens. Suddenly among them is Sweet Micky himself, wearing jeans and a white T-shirt.
The crowd turns ecstatic as Martelly clambers on top of the sound system stacked in the back of a battered pick-up truck and starts singing. “Ou la la, ou ou la la . . . ”
A sea of campaign T-shirts is singing and swaying along as 49-year-old Sweet Micky gyrates to his signature tunes.
Martelly’s late-campaign slogan is “Tèt Kale” — which literally means shaved head, or the bald one, but metaphorically conjures something clean, out in the open.
For days, his recorded messages promising change have been pumping into the ears of cellphone subscribers.
Sweet Micky is the reason Martine Pierre-Louis had, on this day, lined up at 4 a.m. in front of the Pétionville police station to collect the electoral card allowing her to vote. And why, six hours later, she was still there with perhaps 100 people ahead of her and untold hundreds behind.
An asthmatic with a little puffer in hand, Pierre-Louis just wants change, or the hope of change, something she figures only Martelly can bring.
It’s easy to find Haitians who similarly adore Sweet Micky, hard to find even opponents without a soft spot for the guy. Bayard Gehy, who’s voting for Manigat, says she’d be among the first to leap up and give Micky a kiss if he walked into the room.
“Everybody likes him,” she says, “but he doesn’t have the logistics on the ground.”
By which she means money. Rule of thumb: the top candidates will each spend $1 million on election day alone, just to pay and feed campaign workers and the scrutineers at polling stations.
The Johnnie Walker is flowing just fine at the Kinam Hotel in Pétionville. This more than suits Patrick Elie, who at 60 and diagnosed with cancer seems to relish his role as raconteur as much as his continuing power to provoke.
He has history, which is what you’d expect from a biochemist educated in Canada (Sherbrooke, McGill) who just happens to have spent years as an confidante of Aristide (now in exile in South Africa) and, more controversially, as the guy running Aristide’s security operation in the 1990s.
This would be the role that, more or less, led to a two-year stint in an American prison on weapons trafficking charges. The punchline of this story is that, when U.S. prosecutors wanted him to strike a deal and point fingers at those who’d committed political murders in Haiti, Elie demanded to know in return the real culprits in the assassinations of John F. Kennedy and Martin Luther King.
This exchange ended badly.
“I’ve made all the mistakes that could have been made,” he says. “I was in gun-running, all kinds of stupidity.”
The other thing you need to know is that Elie is married to Préval’s sister, Préval having been an Aristide ally in a previous life — the kind of three degrees of separation trick that Haiti seems to have raised to an art form.
But Elie doesn’t have much time for Préval’s chosen one, Célestin, the newcomer. “When did Célestin ever figure in the political life of this country? When did he show up?”
Elie is certain that this time, there will be a presidential runoff, one that Manigat will win. Not that this will signify much.
“I don’t believe this election has any true sense,” he says. “It is just empty. All we are seeing is egos and personalities on the scene. It’s about personal ambitions and it’s about who’s going to get the largest part of the loot of reconstruction, not about society.
“We must have elections but we must have elections that are loaded with meaning.”
In Elie’s hands, the socialist torch has scarcely dimmed. He still divides Haitian society into two camps, starting with the 30 per cent who don’t really trust democracy, or at least not one dominated by Haiti’s illiterate masses.
Aristide was, to Elie, less a conventional leader than a symbol of how the downtrodden poor — the other 70 per cent—had finally arrived on the political scene.
They once did so en masse, overwhelmingly throwing their lot in with Aristide, the ghost who still stalks Haiti. Now they’re ceaselessly divided into warring camps, in this election as in the last, their anger and hopes splintered in too many directions.
“It breaks my heart,” says Elie. “And yet I’m still optimistic. We’ve just got to go through that. It’s part of growing up.”
Sasaye- Super Star
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Nombre de messages : 8252
Localisation : Canada
Opinion politique : Indépendance totale
Loisirs : Arts et Musique, Pale Ayisien
Date d'inscription : 02/03/2007
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Jeu de rôle: Maestro
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