As I mentioned the other day, Solomon Islands went to the polls last week. Counting has been a slow process – although the electoral commission is quite right to say that doing it right is more important than doing it quickly – but appears now to be complete. Settling on a new government, however, could take some time.
The election was more than usually newsworthy because the Solomons’ relationship with Australia, the main regional power, has deteriorated under current prime minister Manasseh Sogavare. Sogavare, who took office in 2019, promptly withdrew recognition of Taiwan and established close relations with China, including a security treaty signed in 2022. He also engaged in a spat with Australia over the postponement of the election, originally due last year.
Australia ditched Taiwan in favor of diplomatic relations with China back in 1972, so it can hardly complain about the Solomons doing the same half a century later. But the prospect of military co-operation with China was obviously a matter of some concern; as usual, Australia and other western powers showed much more interest in foreign policy questions than in democratic backsliding for its own sake.
As is common in the south Pacific, elections are by first-past-the-post in tiny single-member districts (fifty of them, averaging about 7,000 voters each). Party divisions are vague and fluid and most MPs behave like independents. After the 2019 election, Sogavare corralled a number of them (ultimately 32) into a personal vehicle, the Ownership, Unity and Responsibility Party (OUR); the opposition was divided among a number of groups, most prominently the Democratic Party and the United Party.
The prime minister may well be able to perform the same trick again, but OUR’s performance is a bit underwhelming. It has topped the poll with 24.1% and 15 seats; the Democratic Party (19.3%) and the United Party (13.5%) have a lot more votes between them but one fewer seat, with eight and six respectively. Another five parties, most of them anti-Sogavare, collected a total of ten seats and there are eleven independents.
Three of the fifty successful candidates are women (down one), which is sadly fairly typical for the region. Turnout was 82.3%, down about four points from 2019. (Official results here, which I’ve supplemented from media reports.)
There will now be a period of negotiation and horse-trading before the numbers for or against a change in government become clear. As Graeme Smith from ANU puts it (as quoted by the ABC), “Basically people divide into camps and all sorts of lobbying goes on … And all sorts of acts of corruption also take place in order to sway the MPs.” The process will culminate in a secret ballot in parliament, probably next month.
The World is Not Enough 