Two unsurprising results

Australia is still very much in holiday mode, but two large elections have been held over the Christmas-New Year period. Unfortunately, neither was much of an exercise in democracy.

First was the Democratic Republic of the Congo (DRC), which voted just before Christmas in presidential and parliamentary elections (see my preview here). As you’d expect in a country with such logistical challenges it took a while for results to appear, but when they did they showed incumbent president Félix Tshisekedi a runaway winner with 73.3% of the vote.

Businessman Moïse Katumbi was runner-up with 18.1%, followed by Martin Fayulu, who came second (and according to many observers should really have won) in 2018, on 5.3%. None of the other 19 – some of whom had actually withdrawn prior to the vote – could manage more than 1%. Tshisekedi will be sworn in for a second term on 20 January.

The opposition has alleged fraud, but the chance of its claims being taken seriously seems remote. The electoral commission has, however, prior to releasing results from the parliamentary, provincial and local elections, disqualified a total of 82 candidates (three of them government ministers) for assorted violations of the electoral rules, including fraud, vandalism and incitement of violence.

It’s obvious that this was an unsatisfactory election, but it’s worth pointing out that it is a huge improvement on the way almost all of the DRC’s past leaders have been chosen. And there’s nothing unbelievable in the idea that a large majority of the country’s voters would be willing to trust the president with another five years in the job.

In Bangladesh, which voted last Sunday (previewed here), its rulers have somewhat less excuse for their authoritarianism. Unlike the DRC, it has a real if intermittent history of democracy. But under prime minister Sheikh Hasina and her Awami League things have been going downhill for more than a decade.

This year the main opposition party, the Bangladesh Nationalist Party (BNP) – which the prime minister described as “a terrorist organisation” – chose to boycott the election. Whether or not that was the appropriate response can be debated, but with many of its leading figures in prison or in exile it was clearly correct to argue that the conditions for a fair election were not present.

So the government, of course, has won a large majority. Of the 300 directly-elected seats, the Awami League has won 222; the only serious opposition party in the field, the relatively tame Jatiya Party, picked up 11. There will be 62 independents, the majority of whom are apparently pro-government. (There will also be another 50 seats reserved for women, which are chosen by the first 300.)

Given the boycott, the more relevant figure is probably the turnout, officially given as 41.8%. That’s a big drop from 2018’s 80.2%, but non-government sources say that even that is overstated. It’s impossible to say whether or not Hasina would have won a fair election, but it seems clear that discontent with her rule is on the increase – and without a democratic outlet, that discontent will find other ways of expressing itself.

There are, however, some democratic elections left in Asia: on Friday we’ll preview Taiwan’s presidential election, which is looking like a close contest.