Elections 2023: Argentina, Spain, Liberia, Senegal
In Argentina voters shock the world, turning overwhelmingly to Trumpism, Latin-style…in Spain it's back to the future, and in Liberia a welcome peaceful transition and contrast with nearby Senegal?
Continuing our pledge at Andelman Unleashed to report and comment on every national election everywhere in the world, this week, four dramatic turns of events.
Argentina
The theme of his campaign said it all: a preview of what may well be in store for Argentina. It’s the chain saw that television performer and economist Javier Milei, 53, pledged to take to Argentina’s government, economy, and society with his victory in Sunday’s race for the presidency.
And it was by every measure a stunning, sweeping win—a 56% to 44% margin that more than three-quarters of all eligible voters gave to Milei over his center-left Peronist challenger, Sergio Massa, the country’s now out-going Minister of Economy.
Among the first global figures to weigh in with congratulations was Donald Trump, writing on his Truth Social app:
"The whole world was watching! I am very proud of you. You will turn your Country around and truly Make Argentina Great Again!"
Milei had clearly taken Trump, particularly his unheralded victory in 2016, as a model. Now, with the Argentinian’s unexpectedly overwhelming success, is this a cautionary tale for the United States? Milei has 11 months to prove he can work miracles. If he does, can tangible accomplishments with his model sway voters in the United States, which so many Argentines take as a paragon of success?
Sergio Massa, Milei’s liberal opponent, had rolled the dice, campaigning effectively on a platform of continuity for the Peronist political construct that has governed the country for 10 out of the 13 freely contested presidencies since the reign of Juan Peron that a right-wing military coup brought to an end in 1974.
As Andelman Unleashed first explained last month following the first-round balloting, Peronism is also a concept that what is now clearly an overwhelming majority of the country blames for the spiraling poverty into which 44% of the country has been plunged. Combined with the 142% year-over-year inflation, tens of thousands have been driven into exile abroad, some to the United States, but most to Spain. Barcelona has been nicknamed “BA on the Med” (Buenos Aires on the Mediterranean). Others have flooded to neighboring Chile on the west and Uruguay to the east.
“I did not come here to guide lambs but to wake the lions!” was the theme of Milei’s campaign, and the electoral map does show him sweeping the broad mass of voters across the nation, carrying 21 of the 24 Argentine provinces especially in the most impoverished countryside, even the capital, Buenos Aires.
It’s the most broadly-based showing for any president since 1983 when the military returned the nation to a democracy, relinquishing the power it had seized in their coup that toppled Peron. Indeed, the La Libertad Avanza party that, like France’s Emmanuel Macron, Milei formed expressly for his presidential campaign, appears to have embraced views of a dictatorship that many of the most deprived Argentinians seem now to regard with increasing nostalgia. His vice president Victoria Villarruel, along with Milei the child of a soldier, is also a notorious denier of the military’s excesses, described by Human Rights Watch:
From 1976 to 1983, Argentina was governed by a military dictatorship that committed horrendous human rights crimes, including torture, extrajudicial executions, and the imprisonment of thousands without trial. The hallmark of political repression in Argentina, however, was the practice of enforced disappearance.
Night of the Pencils: the junta goes after Peronista students
But now, the central question is will the “shock therapy” Milei has prescribed wind up solving the profound problems that plague this nation today?
Many believe all that remains is the question of how rapidly the entire already desperately wounded Argentine economy and society will take to collapse. Milei’s prescriptions are all but biblical. He has pledged to slash government ministries from 19 to 8. Gone will be the ministries of culture; education; environment; and women, gender, and diversity. Only the ministries of defense, justice, economy, foreign affairs, infrastructure, security, and interior will be maintained, though he intends to add a “ministry of human capital,” which will absorb the functions of four portfolios: social development, health, labor, and education.
He's also proposed charging fees for access to the public health system, plans a referendum to abolish the country’s 2020 constitutional reform that legalized abortion, legalize the carrying of weapons, eliminate compulsory sex education in schools, and restrict the entry of foreigners. In the final weeks of the campaign, though, he’s walked back some of his health care and weapons proposals. It remains to be seen how much of the rest of the program goes out the window.
Milei, incidentally, is not believed ever to have met Donald Trump personally. But before the election, Trump acolyte Tucker Carlson did travel to Buenos Aires to interview him for his X podcast.
If all this sounds like a familiar echo of a Trumpist playbook, there’s so much more, especially in the economic sphere. Milei has announced his intention to shutter the central bank and adopt the U.S. dollar as replacement for the beleaguered peso. In October, the black-market street value passed 1,000 pesos to the dollar—one-third the official value of 350 for one greenback. Since the first-round presidential vote on October 22, the peso has shed 44% of its value.
If Milei makes good on his pledge of dollarizing the economy, Argentina would become the largest of 11 other countries to have taken such a step. The only other one in South America is the deeply troubled nation of Ecuador where drug gangs have been running wild. The principal problem with this idea is that Argentina would effectively lose all control over its economy and its monetary policies, especially with no central bank able to regulate exchange rates and the U.S. Federal Reserve the only central bank to control interest rates and money supply for Argentina, but based solely on trends in the American economy.
In short, the roller coaster begins today, and for real when Milei takes over in less than three weeks. Hang on for a ride that Andelman Unleashed will be chronicling at every turn.
Spain
Meanwhile, in Spain, where so many Argentines have sought sanctuary, the left has retained power. “Pedro Sanchez is a specialist in surprises,” wrote Carlos E. Cué and José Marcos in the Spanish daily El País, but no one expects a complete revolution like the one in July 2021.” That’s the last time Sanchez became prime minister. But indeed, as El País points out, this is just “the second left-wing coalition government in Spain since the Second Republic.”
It was not easy to get here, yet by a curiosity of Spanish politics, it will represent less of a political earthquake than might have been foreseen after the actual voting on July 23 when as Andelman Unleashed pointed out at the time:
Spain appears to have rejoined the ranks of those floundering European nations struggling to find a leader, let alone a stable, highly functioning government. On Sunday, Spanish voters couldn’t quite bring themselves either to give the reigning Socialists a firm new lease on life or welcome the heirs of far-right dictator Francisco Franco back into a position of even helping to rule their nation. So, while the center right People’s Party (PP) surged into the lead, gaining 61 seats in the parliament, they failed to win the absolute majority they needed to form a government with Vox, the party of the hard-right.
There ensued four months of uncertainty after the center-right Peoples Party surged into the lead in terms of seats in the National Assembly, gaining 61 seats, but still not enough for the absolute majority it would have needed to govern alone.
Instead the PP’s leader, Alberto Núñez Feijó, sought desperately to form a coalition that could govern, but even with the help of the hard-right Vox party, failed. So Sanchez, with what El País termed his “seven lives,” continued to govern until King Felipe VI finally asked him formally to form a new government and continue officially in power.
The problem for Sanchez—and for Spain—is that to form his own government, with just 122 seats of his own in a 350-seat Congress, even with the support of the far-left Sumar party, he’s been forced to win the support of five regional parties. These included two separatist parties from Catalonia that six years ago held an illegal referendum seeking outright independence from Spain. As The Economist, which has been following every twist and turn of this saga, pointed out:
Junts per Catalunya (“Together for Catalonia”) held out for the biggest prize: an amnesty for hundreds of people prosecuted for the referendum. It would allow, most notably, its leader and Catalonia’s former president, Carles Puigdemont, to return from exile in Belgium. The prospect of this amnesty has brought Spain’s politics, at an angry simmer at the best of times, to a raging boil. Mr Sánchez’s solid control over his party ensured that he won a vote in parliament on November 16th to reinstall him as prime minister. But the new term comes at a heavy cost. Mr Sánchez had insisted before the election that any amnesty would be unconstitutional, a view shared by many other Socialists, including Felipe González, modern Spain’s longest-serving prime minister (1982-1996).
Negotiations leading up to Sanchez’s victory dragged on for weeks, turning into months. Finally, the day before his confirmation in the Congress with the help of the Catalans, Sanchez conceded, “The circumstances are what they are. It is time to make a virtue of necessity.”
So when will Puigdemont be coming home and what might the consequence be for the stability of Spain? His exile was self-imposed. The bill granting a blanket amnesty has an 11-page prologue explaining why it’s all necessary. As it happens, Puigdemont is basking (no pun intended) in all the attention. As The Guardian reported:
Despite the fast-moving, wildly unpredictable and frequently improbable turns Spanish politics has taken of late, very few pundits could have predicted the scenes that played out in Belgium on Thursday.
A little after 2pm, a 60-year-old Catalan politician and fugitive from Spanish justice addressed a packed conference at the Brussels press club. As reporters brimmed with questions that would go unanswered, Carles Puigdemont appeared to be relishing his moment. “We are entering an unprecedented stage that must be explored and made use of,” he said. His words were hardly an understatement.
The ultimate question of course is the one raised in October by Maria Ramírez, deputy manager editor of Spain’s elDiario as the current stewpot was just coming a boil: “Spain is becoming harder to govern. Is this the future of our divided politics?
Liberia
In recent years, Liberia has seen its fair share of fraught transitions—violence punctuating changes, even those clearly defined at the ballot box. Now, suddenly, it appears quite possibly to be on the cusp of a new era. As the State Department observed this past week:
Liberian President George Weah conceded defeat today to Joseph Boakai in the presidential runoff election held on November 14.
We congratulate president-elect Boakai on his victory and President Weah for his peaceful acceptance of the results. As President Weah said in his concession speech, “Tonight, the CDC has lost the election, but Liberia has won. This is a time for graciousness in defeat, a time to place our country above party, and patriotism above personal interest . . . Let us heal the divisions caused by the campaign and come together as one nation and one united people.”
The United States congratulates the people of Liberia on holding a peaceful presidential runoff election. We note the broad participation of Liberians across the country and applaud the commitment and dedication of Liberian citizens in exercising their right to vote and in engaging in the electoral process peacefully. Liberians deserve and expect free and fair, peaceful elections. We call on all citizens to follow President Weah’s example and accept the results.
Indeed, the world and Africa had been holding its collective breath. Boakai, 78 won with a razor-thin majority of 50.8% to 49.1% over Weah. It was a sharp turnaround from 2017 when Weah soared to an easy 62% to 38% win. But the international soccer star failed to stem the nation’s main problems of poverty, unemployment, food insecurity and spotty supplies of electricity.
A peaceful transition, however, will be a fortuitous start to Boakai’s presidency.
Senegal
A sharp contrast, incidentally, to Senegal just up the coast—facing increasing chaos as the nation’s Supreme Court overturned a lower court ruling that would have allowed onto the ballot the leading opposition candidate, Ousmane Sonko, head of the Senegalese Patriots for Work, Ethics and Brotherhood Party.
Meanwhile, riots have already broken out….
As France 24 reported from Monrovia:
Sonko denounced the trial as a plot to exclude him from the election. The charges, include fomenting insurrection, criminally associating with a terrorist body and endangering state security. He has periodically been on hunger strikes since then. The supreme court did not announce a date for his retrial.
The nation’s president, Macky Sal, has little interest in relinquishing power after just two terms in office, no matter what happens at the ballot box next February.
On November 3, he replaced “by decree” all 12 members of the “Autonomous National Election Commission,” since as Mehdi Bar reported in the venerable magazine Jeune Afrique, they’d simply been “guilty of having contradicted the official line in the Ousmane Sonko affair.” None of which made any of Senegal’s West African neighbors any less anxious, as Bar continued:
If we had to cite just one reason explaining the turmoil that gripped part of the Senegalese opposition and civil society the day after the announcement of the replacement by presidential decree of the commission, we could find it in the protocol on democracy and good governance of the Economic Community of West African States (ECOWAS). “The bodies responsible for elections must be independent and/or neutral and have the confidence of the actors and protagonists of political life.”
Indeed, in March, Amnesty International reported “Senegalese authorities are intensifying repression ahead of the 2024 presidential election by cracking down on human rights, restricting civic space, banning protests and detaining a journalist and opposition figures.”
For results and the stakes, check back with Andelman Unleashed as we continue to monitor every national election ever year around the world.
It's beginning to look like we might get some results by tomorrow ... stand by for the final 'results' in this coming weekend's TWTW (The World This Week) !!
And we DO applaud Professor Rotberg for his always trenchant commentary ... Madagascar is indeed quite a stewpot ... we are awaiting results (four days already and still counting?....as violence builds) Oh my !