Election of the week (maybe): Madagascar

The Malagasy Presidential election is taking place on Thursday, maybe. This election was originally scheduled to take place last Thursday, November 9th, but the High Constitutional Court postponed the election by a week in early October, over the objections of the incumbent (or more accurately incumbent-ish, as explained below) candidate Andry Rajoelina. The second round election, if needed, is still scheduled for December 20th. This will be the third election (and, hopefully, the third presidential election since a coup d’état in March of 2009, which culminated with the aforementioned Rajoelina being declared President of the High Transitional Authority of Madagascar, and elected president Marc Ravalomanana fleeing to South Africa, where he would remain in exile the next three years while negotiating the terms of the return to democracy in Madagascar, and his own return from exile, behind the scenes.

Upon assuming this transitional role, Rajoelina pledged a new national election would be held with 24 months; it took more than twice that long. The new presidential election did take place in late 2013. Despite a pledge not to run from 2009, Rajoelina was planning to run, but was not allowed on the ballot after missing some procedural deadlines. He ultimately supported the winning candidate, Hery Rajoanarimampianina, as did most of Madagascar’s political elites, although Ravalomanana, now returned from exile, backed the losing candidate, Jean Louis Robinson. Fast forward to 2018: Rajoelina wants back in, and runs against the candidate he’d endorsed 5 years earlier. Rajoanarimampianina, delusionally, resigned to run for another term. (Under the Malagasy constitution, a sitting president cannot run for re-election, so they must resign before the election, turning over the office to the Senate president for the last few months of the term. Rajoelina resigned in early September for this reason.) He came in a distant 3rd in the first round. The top two were Rajoelina and the man he had successfully removed via coup d’état a decade earlier, Marc Ravalomanana. Rajoelina won by 10%, ascending to his second presidency, and his first elected, constitutional one.

While Rajoelina initially opposed the one week postponement of the election, his legislative allies, perhaps fearing a poor result, are now calling for an extended postponement. This election has a very crowded double-digit field, with familiar names including 2014 winner Rajoanarimampianina and 2001/2006 winner/coup victim Ravalomanana. Most of the opposition candidates have been demanding Rajoelina be declared ineligible. Under Malagasy law, the president must be a citizen of Madagascar. Rajoelina sought and obtained French citizenship for himself and his family in 2014, and according to Article 42 of the 1960 law on citizenship, accepting a foreign citizenship is considered a renunciation. As best as I can tell, this complaint may well have legal merit, but the current government, electoral commission, and the High Court all appear to be in Rajoelina’s corner, making that legal merit potentially not particularly practically useful.

This election has been deeply contentious. Many of the opposition candidates have been holding joint daily rallies and protests in the capital Antananarivo and other major cities, against what they consider to be an illegitimate electoral process, due in large part to Rajoelina’s alleged ineligibility, and these protests are routinely broken up by tear-gas wielding police officers. All these rallies are in defiance of an April prohibition, announced by Rajoelina, against public political rallies, in the interests, allegedly, of public safety.

SOP for this series is to post the day of or day before the election is scheduled to take place. I’m posting this now in part because there appears to be a real chance there will not be an election on Thursday to post about. It’s difficult to get a clear sense of the state of play at the moment. Just a few days ago, political scientist and Madagascar specialist Adrien Ratsimbaharison argued that it’s clearly in Rajoelina’s interests to press ahead and move forward with the election despite the controversy and turmoil. But a few days later, reports that his legislative allies are calling for a suspension and postponement began to emerge:

The head of Madagascar’s lower house of parliament on Thursday called for the suspension of next week’s presidential elections, after weeks of regular opposition rallies.

Christine Razanamahasoa, who leads a mediation group to find a way out of a political crisis that has raged for weeks, said the current situation in the country did not allow for a free and credible vote to be held on November 16.

The mediation group “strongly demands that authorities suspend the presidential election scheduled for November 16,” Razanamahasoa told a press conference in Antananarivo.

This, she said, was to ensure “peace” and “harmony” in the country, where political tensions have been running high in the run-up to the vote, which was already postponed by a week.

At least two possibilities present themselves: 1) that Razanamahasoa is making this call because Rajoelina now fears a sufficiently bad outcome on Thursday, and wants to postpone for that reason, or 2) that Razanamahasoa and other Rajoelina allies in the legislature are abandoning a sinking ship and siding with the opposition. (It should be noted that legislative elections are held separately, so she and her legislative allies will not be facing the voters herself should the election proceed as scheduled. The next parliamentary election should take place in around six months.) The Barron’s piece implies the violence associated with the daily protests took a turn for the worse Wednesday, and one of the presidential candidates (unnamed, so presumably minor) was detained by the police. That could be a motivation for either scenario above.

In sum, there is much we don’t know, but we do know this: there may be a presidential election this week in Madagascar, but also there maybe not be. If there is, it seems to me it would probably be best all things considered if Rajoelina didn’t win or ideally didn’t advance to the next round. Presumably some of the other candidates would be better than others, but I’m afraid I don’t have much analysis to offer here on the particulars. There’s a lot at stake for the nearly 30 million residents of the world’s 4th largest island; it’s reasonable to fear another political crisis along the lines of 2009 would be devastating; the country has been very slow to recover economically from the capital flight of 2009, and the economic progress of the aughts, which was not insubstantial, has mostly stalled or reversed since.