Elections 2023: Zimbabwe, Guatemala, Ecuador, Argentina, Thailand, Singapore
Zimbabwe opts for a ghost …anti-corruption in Guatemala... Ecuador's election under a cloud … Argentina's shocking right turn … Thailand ignores its voters' will … Singapore looks to much of the same.
Continuing our pledge at Andelman Unleashed to report and comment on every national election everywhere in the world, voters in Zimbabwe go to the polls to ratify dysfunction … Guatemala chooses the good guys … Ecuador's polarized vote under a cloud … Argentina's shocking runoff … Thailand, where Thaksin comes home … and Singapore looks to choose more of the same.
Zimbabwe's ghost
The transformation of the desperate conditions most voters in Zimbabwe are suffering seem most likely to prove elusive as voters came to the polls to elect their new president.
Indeed, the successor to Robert Mugabe, who ruled his nation as a dictator for 43 years before finally being ousted in a military coup 16 years ago, has proven to be little better. Emmerson Mnangagwa, an 80-year-old former guerrilla liberation fighter known as "the crocodile," has done little to improve the lives of the people who first elected him and were now being asked to do so again—and appeared to be willing to comply. He appears likely to continue his one-man rule for yet another term in office.
For the official results, look for TWTW: The World This Week / Episode 54 on Andelman Unleashed coming Sunday.
Much of his success at the ballot box is a tribute to the electoral machinery Mnangagwa has assembled—barely short of the outright corruption that was the hallmark of the Mugabe years and led to the country being isolated by much of the world, his people bearing the brunt of the burden of broad international sanctions and boycotts. The evening of the first day of voting, police descended on the offices of two poll monitoring groups, as the BBC reported, “arrested 41 election monitors for allegedly trying to disrupt the voting process. Those being held, from civil society groups, were allegedly co-ordinating the release of results from Wednesday's general election, police say. They are being charged with breaking electoral law. Civil society groups have tried to do their own vote count to compare results with the official tally in light of disputes over past election results.”
The day before the balloting, US State Department spokesman Matthew Miller pleaded:
"We are concerned by recent actions leading up to the elections, including political violence and legislation that curtails human rights and freedoms enshrined in Zimbabwe’s constitution….We call on the government of Zimbabwe and all political leaders to ensure the elections are free of violence and coercion."
As Nyasha Chingono in Harare wrote for London's Guardian, the "combined presidential, parliamentary and local elections, [were held] amid acute concern over an intensifying crackdown on the main opposition party and its supporters. Twelve candidates were running for the presidency, but the competition was essentially a re-run of the 2018 race between the president, Emmerson Mnangagwa and the CCC [Citizens Coalition for Change] leader, Nelson Chamisa, 45, in a country beset by corruption, inflation, poverty and unemployment."
The ouster of Mugabe has done little, as Chingono wrote, "to break Zanu-PF’s 43-year stranglehold on power." Mnangagwa has turned out to be little more than a pale, if determined, continuation of the reign of Mugabe and Zanu-PF, which itself was born during the colonial-era battles against the white government of Rhodesia, the name of the country preceding its change to Zimbabwe.
Mugabe took over in 1980 when the whites were ousted, and the nation never knew another leader for 37 years.
Not that anyone could tell much of a difference. During Mnangagwa's first term, inflation soared to 175%, more than doubling just from May to June this year. Still, that was down from a peak of 761% in August 2020, though suddenly it seems to be heading in the wrong direction again. To trim the cost of printing more currency, the government has been pushing EFT (electronic fund transfer), which is hardly getting at the root causes. The value of the Zimbabwe dollar has plunged by 85% just since January. Barely 30% hold conventional, full time jobs. Half the population of Zimbabwe lives in extreme poverty, defined by the UN as less than $1.25 per day.
Not surprisingly, the youth vote seemed prepared to swing toward the 45-year-old Nelson Chamisa who spent much of the campaign inveighing against the corruption that was sapping the economy, business, and government. Clearly, it was not enough.
Guatemala…a rare rebuke to corruption
Difficult thought it may be to believe, voters in Guatemala actually went for the good guys—opting for a tough anti-corruption advocate as their new president, handing a stunning rebuke to the entrenched, conservative establishment that for years has held this most densely populated Central American nation in their sway.
In a two-way runoff, Bernard Arévalo, overwhelmed his opponent, Sandra Torres, a former first lady of Guatemala, 58% to 37%. The campaign waged by the former journalist and sociologist Arévalo was founded on an end to the corruption of the long-standing autocratic rulers who had shown no compunction about shuttering even UN-supported efforts to expose and root out corruption. He was running with Karin Herrera as his vice presidential candidate.
As Robert I. Rotberg, the noted Harvard Kennedy School professor who has made anti-corruption crusades his métier, put it in his SubStack page:
"Arevalo, the first progressive to lead Guatemala since the end of brutal [three decades of] 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."
Guatemala's dictators somehow managed to maintain their longtime close ties with the United States. As far back as 1954, the CIA engineered the removal from power of the nation's democratically-elected president, Jacobo Árbenz Guzmán, fearing he was soft on communism at the height of the Cold War and just as Fidel Castro was arriving in Cuba. That American-inspired action led to decades of corrupt far-right leaders in Guatemala who still pledged their loyalty to the US, despite their failure to eradicate conditions that forced millions to head north—serving as a leading source of immigration, largely illegal, into the US. The hordes of those exiting Guatemala have included judges and prosecutors who'd tried in vain to turn the tide of corruption, in response forced out of their homeland. Perhaps now, Guatemala stands a chance for a new beginning.
Ecuador's heads to a runoff
A most likely winner never made it to the polls. Fernando Villavicencio was murdered August 9 while leaving a campaign rally. His execution-style slaying was only the latest symbol of the unprecedented violence sweeping the country that each candidate needed to address in some fashion. Drug trafficking groups from Colombia and Mexico are battling for control of large swaths of Ecuador, especially the Pacific coastline with easy seaborne access to US landing points.
As it happens, Villavicencio's replacement did not make it into the top two and the inevitable second round. Leftist Luisa González came in first with 33%, followed by former lawmaker Daniel Noboa with 24%. Third, with 16%, was Christian Zurita, whose name was not even on the ballot, his entry only at the last minute as the stand-in to the assassinated Villavicencio. So he will not be in the final round.
Luisa González will face off with Daniel Noboa in a two-person runoff on October 15. To win outright, a candidate needed 50% of the vote, or at least 40% with a 10-point lead over the closest opponent.
González had scored at the top in all pre-election polls, and her party, Citizen Revolutionary Movement, was founded by popular former president Rafael Correa, who since 2017 has been living in exile under the political asylum granted him by Belgium, his wife's birthplace. Ecuador still wants him arrested and extradited on corruption charges, which he denies.
Argentina's right turn?
A far-right protest candidate who gave himself a slim chance for victory, surged to a stunning first-place finish in the first of what is likely to be three rounds of presidential balloting. Javier Milei, 52, a congressman, economist and former television pundit, has been seen as a Latino version of Donald Trump and pledged some radical solutions to Argentina's desperate ills—abolishing the Central Bank and the peso, adopting the US dollar as the official currency, slashing taxes and public spending, charging people to use the public health care system, closing or privatizing all state-owned enterprises, and eliminating ministries of health, education and environment.
Despite, or perhaps because, of his radical pledges, Milei racked up a 30 percent plurality in last week's open presidential primary, far outdistancing every pre-vote poll and catapulting him into the pole position for the October 22 first-round of the official election with a likely final runoff November 19.
It's a curious three-round contest for leadership of this struggling nation of 46 million that boasts among the world's leading stocks of oil, gas, and the lithium that’s a core of the world electronics industry. Since this was a primary, political parties were able to field multiple candidates, so there were at least 28 candidates divided among 15 political groups.
After the vote, in a clear effort to expand his potential vote in the October election, Milei observed that he would use a "chain saw" to reform the state, but as the Buenos Aires daily La Prensa quickly added, "the changes would not be instantaneous."
Still, Milei will have some formidable competition in the October balloting—particularly Sergio Massa, Argentina’s center-left finance minister, who finished second in the primary, with 21% of the vote, and third-place finisher Patricia Bullrich, a conservative former security minister, with 17%. Each does have powerful political machines behind them for what promises to be a grueling Fall campaign.
The center-left, controlled for 16 of the past 20 years by former President Cristina Fernández de Kirchner, has largely run Argentina into the ground. As Milei pledged on election night last week, “We’re not only going to end Kirchnerism, but we’re also going to end the useless, parasitic, criminal political caste that is sinking this country.” Ambitious goals for a political neophyte, but a promise that could appeal to quite a broad swath of the electorate. Make Argentina Great Again? We know where, for US dollars, Milei could pick up quite a stash of electoral swag. Just suggesting.
Thailand: return of an icon, end of a dream
Thailand, a theoretical democracy under the firm control of a powerful military and their puppet monarch, has a new prime minister. Of course, it’s not the individual that a majority of Thai voters selected at the polls back in May. But it is an individual the military and king think they can live with, or at least who won't in any respect rock the national boat where they have been living so comfortably, and prosperously, in the past.
So, after months of dickering, the establishment—in the form of an 11-party coalition—has settled on Sretta Thavisin, a real estate tycoon and political neophyte, of the Pheu Thai Party as the government's new, nominal leader.
Left out in the cold—the youth-oriented party of reformers, Move Forward, now blocked from forming a government despite its extraordinary victory in the May 14 parliamentary elections, as Andelman Unleashed chronicled. Move Forward won 152 seats, a plurality in the House, and appeared to catapult its Harvard-educated, but monarchy-skeptical leader, 42-year-old Pita Limjaroenrat, into the prime ministership.
Not so fast, the Establishment said. And sure enough, weeks ago, as we reported on July 22, Pita was out. Now, Pheu Thai is in.
And hardly surprisingly, the former prime minister, Pheu Thai icon Thaksin Shinawatra, who'd fled into exile, returned in a private jet to Bangkok the same night Sretta was sworn in. For the moment, he went directly to jail, though clearly the fix was in. As the BBC's Bangkok correspondent Jonathan Head reported:
"Thaksin, Thailand's most successful elected leader, has long been feared by conservative royalists, who have backed military coups and contentious court cases to weaken him. He went into self-imposed exile in 2008 after being deposed by a coup two years earlier. While he made no secret of his yearning to be back in Thailand, what kept him away so long was the various criminal cases hanging over him. But now the brash, politically ambitious telecoms tycoon is back—and was almost immediately sentenced to eight years' jail on criminal convictions he says are politically motivated."
Still, Thaksin's party, Pheu Thai is suddenly in the driver's seat. So, what gives?
It seems as though Pheu Thai and Thaksin made a deal with the devil, as the BBC continued, "for the ultra-royalists, the perceived threat posed by Move Forward, and by a younger generation of Thais demanding a conversation about the power and wealth of the monarchy, eclipsed their long feud with the Shinawatra family. For the Shinawatras, and Pheu Thai's more conservative, business-minded elements, getting into government again and guaranteeing the deal to bring Mr Thaksin back, have been bigger priorities than worrying about the party's reputation."
Indeed, what really seems to have happened is that Thaksin managed with a single stroke to have destroyed his leading young rival and neutered his parliamentary majority. A win-win for everyone except the Thai people who once trusted Thaksin with their loyalty, their love, and their nation.
Finally, there's Singapore where the slate's set
This is how Japanese news agency Nikkei Asia put it, indeed the way much of Asia is looking at what is shaping up for a "the more things change, they remain the same“ election in Singapore on September 1 for the nation-state's president: "Amid a string of scandals shaking the city-state's usually staid political scene, three contenders… are former Deputy Prime Minister Tharman Shanmugaratnam; a former chief investment officer at the sovereign wealth fund GIC, Ng Kok Song; and a former insurance company head under the national trade union body, Tan Kin Lian."
The scandals largely involved extra-marital affairs within the ultra-staid party and government establishments, controlled as they have been for a half century by the powerful Lee family.
Lee Kwan Yew, the first prime minister beginning in 1959 through 1990, and for the past 19 years by his son, Lee Hsien Loong have ruled with a certain hard-nosed democratic benevolence.
None of that is on the line in this election, but some sense of the electorate’s feeling about disarray at the top may be the most important outcome of this year's balloting.
As usual, stay tuned.
Not quite sure just what Argentina would get out of tying itself up with the likes of China, Russia, Saudi Arabia, Iran beyond simply expanding its ties to a growing list of global felons ?!
You never fail to add value or enrich my own researches, reportage, and commentary, professor !