Three continents, three elections

Three national elections were held last weekend, providing a study in contrasts.

Sierra Leone

Sierra Leone, which voted last Saturday for both president and parliament (it has full separation of powers, despite being a former British colony), has developed rather good democratic credentials since the end of its civil war in 2002. At the last election, in 2018, the opposition’s Julius Maada Bio won the presidency, beating the ruling party’s Samura Kamara in a runoff with 51.8%.

This year’s contest was a rematch, with Bio seeking a second term and Kamara as his main challenger. Partial results released on Monday night showed Bio with a clear lead, 55.9% to Kamara’s 41.5%; another 11 candidates were sharing the remaining 2.6%. But since the leader requires 55% to avoid a runoff, it was still possible that Bio would fall short.

Final results, however, as released by the electoral commission yesterday show Bio widening his lead slightly, 56.2% to 41.2%, a gap of about 420,000 votes. Not wasting any time, Bio was promptly sworn in, while the opposition protested that the result was fraudulent. Kamara described it as “a frontal attack on our fledgling democracy.”

No figures seem to be available yet for the parliamentary election, but we at least know that it will be held under a democratic electoral system. Last year Bio abolished the old system of first-past-the-post single-member districts and reintroduced proportional representation; in January the supreme court rejected an opposition challenge to the change.

Greece

Greece’s repeat election was held on Sunday, after centre-right leader Kyriakos Mitsotakis decided he didn’t like the result of the first one (see last week’s preview here). As expected, the new rules gave his New Democracy party a majority this time, even though it lost votes. (See official results here.)

Greece’s democracy has clearly been damaged. Turnout dropped by more than eight points, to 52.8%, and support for extremist parties grew: the Communists were up half a point, two extreme nationalist parties (Victory and Course of Freedom) that fell below the 3% threshold last time just made it over this time, and most worryingly of all, the extreme right party Spartans, a successor to the banned Golden Dawn, won 4.6% of the vote and twelve seats.

With eight parties clearing the threshold instead of five, the larger parties all dropped seats – or would have, except for the reinstated winner’s bonus. If the rules had been the same as in May, New Democracy would have won 130 of the 300 seats (down 16), the far-left Syriza 57 (down 14) and the centre-left PASOK 38 (down three). Instead, New Democracy came away with 158, Syriza 48, PASOK 32, and the five extremist parties 62 between them.

In a particularly egregious example of the media’s failure to call out Mitsotakis’s chicanery, the BBC reports that “Under Greek rules for a second election, the biggest party is awarded a bonus of between 20 and 50 seats.” Which is just nonsense: there are no “rules for a second election,” there are just election rules, but changes to them (unless made by consensus) are supposed to take effect only after another election has intervened. By effectively nullifying last month’s election, Mitsotakis has circumvented that very sensible restriction.

Guatemala

Finally Guatemala, which also went to the polls on Sunday for presidential and congressional elections. Presidents are limited to a single term, so the task was to choose a replacement for current centre-right president Alejandro Giammattei, elected in 2019.

Guatemalan democracy is not in good shape; although elections are competitive, the multiple parties are seen as mostly in service to the same corrupt elite. Several leading opposition candidates were disqualified on dubious grounds, and a leading anti-corruption journalist, José Zamora, was recently jailed on charges of money laundering. One voter told AFP, “We vote with enthusiasm, and afterward, the presidents, it’s always the same thing.”

Popular disaffection was reflected in the fact that, while turnout rose to a respectable 58.8%, almost a quarter of those – 24.4% – voted informal. Seven of the 22 candidates recorded more than 5% of the vote; the two leaders, Sandra Torres on 20.9% and Bernardo Arévalo on 15.6%, will go to a runoff on 20 August. Manuel Conde, the candidate of Giammattei’s party, came third with 10.4%. (Official results here.)

Torres, the widow of former president Álvaro Colom, had led on the first round in 2019 as well, but was comfortably overtaken by Giammattei, who won with 58.0%. She and Arévalo, who is the son of another former president, are both nominally left of centre, but it seems unlikely that either of them will bring major change to Guatemala.

PS: Al-Jazeera’s report on Guatemala is very comprehensive.