07 January 2016
Lessons of the Masters
Play up, play up and bend the rules.
By Neil Tidmarsh
Democracy can be a messy business. Election results are often unpredictable. Sometimes they’re unsatisfactory (the governments of Spain and Portugal are becalmed at the moment, as Turkey’s was between elections last year, because recent elections have produced no workable majority; will either of them beat Belgium’s record of 353 days of coalition negotiations without a government?). And on occasion – let’s face it – they’re just plain wrong. What to do?
Luckily there are Great Men (and Women) in the world today who are wise and selfless enough to realise that they know what is good for their country even better than the people they serve. And strong and brave enough to do something about it. They have lessons to teach all the would-be Great Men (and Women) among us.
The first lesson is that being a sore loser isn’t enough in itself. Outgoing president of Argentina Cristina Kirchner tried hard recently, but didn’t quite pull it off. She really didn’t want to leave the Casa Rosales presidential residence – the president-elect Mauricio Macri had to get a High Court ruling to confirm the exact hour when her administration was to end, a legal injunction to tell her when she had to quit the palace. She refused to hand the presidential baton and sash over at the palace, but only at the Congress building. She refused to attend Macri’s inauguration. She even walked off with the Presidential twitter account, so Macri had to set up a new one. But in the end it availed her nothing and she had to go.
But of course her error was even more basic. Macri didn’t beat Cristina herself but her protégé; she couldn’t stand in the elections because she had already served the two term maximum allowed by the constitution. Clearly she should have followed the lead of President Paul Kagame of Rwanda and had the constitution changed. Last year, a referendum in Rwanda to allow the President not just two terms, but three or four or five, was won by a 98% vote; and this week President Kagame confirmed that he will indeed be running for a third term in elections later this year. Lesson number two. Uganda, Chad, Angola and Algeria have also recently changed the rules to allow a presidential third term, and Congo-Brazzaville and Benin are considering it. But it is a high-risk strategy; attempting such a change can trigger violence and even potential civil war, as has recently been the case in Burundi, the Democratic Republic of Congo and Burkina Faso. But, well, it’s always worth a try, isn’t it?
Alternatively, you can get a trusted mate to keep the presidential throne warm for you while you take a little break (e.g. President Putin and President Medvedev) or you can try and keep it in the family (Cristina Kirchner’s predecessor was her husband, and in the USA the name ‘Clinton’ may soon have the same dynastic resonance as ‘Bush’ and ‘Kennedy’).
Lesson three – use all those presidential terms to strengthen your grip on the state apparatus. This lesson comes to us courtesy of President Maduro of Venezuela. (Could President Erdogan of Turkey be thinking along similar lines? This week he told a journalist to “look at Hitler’s Germany” when asked what sort of presidential system he hopes to replace Turkey’s parliamentary system with.) President Maduro and his predecessor President Chavez more or less turned Venezuela into a one-party state in which the president controls parliament, the media, the Supreme Court, the army, the police and the paramilitary neighbourhood militias, and tolerates little opposition. In last month’s parliamentary elections, the opposition coalition didn’t have to win just a majority to hope to begin to challenge that presidential power; they had to win a whopping two-thirds majority. Amazingly, a landslide victory brought the opposition that two-thirds majority with two or three seats to spare. So what happened next?
This week President Maduro launched a legal challenge against the results in a number of seats won by the opposition. The Supreme Court Judges are appointed by the President. The president won his challenge. The Supreme Court blocked three opposition candidates, giving no legal reason for its decision, thus removing the opposition’s two-thirds majority. An opposition spokesman called it a “judicial coup d’etat” and the three blocked MPs have been sworn in regardless. But the President has other tricks up his sleeve; a few days ago it emerged that he passed emergency powers giving him control of the central bank just before the elections… Watch this space for further lessons from a master.
But the most valuable lesson is the fourth and final one; don’t even let the opposition into the race.
In Iran, Hassan Khomeini, the grandson of Ayatollah Khomeini, announced last month that he would be standing as a candidate in next month’s elections. He is a popular cleric with reformist tendencies, but hardliners in the Guardian Council have consistently barred such candidates. This week, the Guardian Council announced that he had missed a religious examination vital to his candidacy.
It remains unclear whether he received the text message telling him that the exam was taking place and that he had to attend.
Today is Twelfth Night – Epiphany – the manifestation of Christ to the Three Magi from the East. It’s generally accepted that the Three Wise Men came from Persia. Persia, of course, is now called Iran. Today of all days it’s nice to know that there are still wise men there. Masters indeed.
