Caribbean & Central America - September 2015 (ISSN 1741-4458)

The international community and local authorities declared satisfaction with the first round of legislative elections held on 9 August for two-thirds of Haiti’s 30-seat national senate and the newly expanded 118-seat lower chamber of congress (previously 99-strong). That the long overdue election took place at all is considered a step forward for Haiti, which is still struggling to recover from the devastation of the 2010 earthquake. A second round run-off will take place on 25 October, concurrently with a first round presidential election. However, since the August vote, doubts have grown as to the legitimacy of the process.

With the legislature inoperative since mid-January last - after the terms of all national deputies and ten senators in the upper chamber (in which a third of seats already were vacant) formally expired - the United Nations (UN) Secretary-General Ban Ki-moon on 7 August hailed the forthcoming election as “a major milestone for democracy in Haiti”.

Even though 26 voting centres (of 1,508 nationwide) were forced to close due to clashes, and there were mutual accusations by political parties of fraud and ballot-stuffing, the president of the provisional electoral council (CEP), Pierre Louis Opont; the police chief, Godson Orelus; and the prime minister, Evans Paul, all described polling day as “acceptable”. Sandra Honoré, the head of the UN Stabilisation Mission in Haiti (Minustah), issued a statement on behalf of the UN and the ‘Core Group’ (the ambassadors of Brazil, Canada, France, Spain, the US, the European Union and the OAS Special Representative) hailing the organisation of the first round, which, the statement said, reflected “the efforts by the CEP, government and national police…in creating an appropriate framework for them to take place”.

Results

On 20 August, the CEP released preliminary results, according to which just eight of the 1,621 candidates competing for the lower chamber avoided a second round run-off, while a ninth also looks set for a first-round victory after his rival was excluded for engaging in electoral violence. None of the senate candidates won in the first round. Turnout was just 18% of registered voters across the country, down on the record low of 22.8% recorded in the last electoral cycle in 2010.

CEP member Néhémie Joseph announced that the court would hold new elections in any constituency in which fewer than 70% of the ballot papers had arrived at the voter tabulation centre – meaning that elections will be restaged in 25 constituencies. The CEP caused some tensions with a decision to exclude a total of 17 candidates for (alleged) electoral violence. The candidates affected were from a range of parties including President Michel Martelly’s Parti Haïtien Têt Kalé (PHTK), Verité, the new party launched by former president René Préval (1996-2001; 2006-2011), and FL.

Several opposition parties already have rejected the preliminary results. As we went to press on 9 September, Verité announced that it was withdrawing from the second round, claiming it was subjected to violent attacks on polling stations in Port-au-Prince and in some 50 of 1,500 voting centres around the country on 9 August. That other parties might also boycott the run-off is not unthinkable.

Presidential poll

The first poll ahead of the presidential election was taken by a private think-tank, Bureau de Recherches en Informatiques et en Développement Economique et Sociale (Brides), and released on 31 July. It put Jude Célestin (Ligue Alternative pour le Progrès et l’Emancipation Haïtienne) in first place with 15.1% of voting intentions. Formerly head of the state-owned construction company, Centre National des Équipements (CNE), Célestin previously ran in the 2010 presidential contest for Préval’s Inité party, before controversially being excluded from the second round. Célestin was followed in second place in the Brides poll by Jean Charles Moïse (Pitit Dessalines), on 9.6%, while the PHTK candidate, mechanical engineer Jovenel Moïse, a relative unknown, was third with 6.1%, below the 7.8% who said they could give ‘no response’ as to which presidential contender they would vote for.

• Civil society reports

On 25 August three civil society groups – RNDDH, the Conseil National d’Observation des Elections (CNO) and the Conseil Haïtien des Acteurs Non Etatiques (CONHANE) – published their electoral observation report. The three organisations – which between them sent 1,500 observers to polling stations in all 10 departments, covering 48% of the 1,508 voting centres – reported incidents of “violence, interruption of the voting process and direct pressure on voters” in 391 of the 728 voting centres it observed, and alleged “massive fraud” in 104 centres. The report also noted incidents of violence between 9 July and 2 August in the run-up to the election. These included five assassinations, two attempted murders and 18 cases of gun-related violence.