🇨🇲🇮🇪🇦🇿 Elections Galore: Cameroon, Ireland and Azerbaijan
🇨🇲🇮🇪🇦🇿 Elections Galore: Cameroon, Ireland and Azerbaijan
Hello! And welcome to another election edition of Inside The Newsroom. THREE elections took place over the weekend, which means I wasn’t able to go into my usual depth/analysis, but we’ll still learn a lot about what’s going on around the world. In Ireland, Sinn Féin surged to victory behind Mary Lou McDonald, but weeks of coalition negotiations now follow. In Azerbaijan, the incumbent New Azerbaijan Party swept to victory in an election marred by procedural violations and inconsistencies. And events turned violent in Cameroon, where it’s too early to tell who won. Okay, let’s get down to business. I don't got no time to play around what is this? 🤓
Cameroon: Election Marred by Violence
Unfortunately we don’t yet have any results from this weekend’s election in Cameroon, and it could be days before we find out who won. The fact that an election was even held is surprising enough, considering the country is entangled in a bloody war between the government and separatist groups. The election was twice postponed in 2017, and the main opposition Cameroon Renaissance Movement party announced a boycott of this latest attempt to vote. While 70 million people were finally able to vote almost three years late, it’s unclear what chunk of the population actually cast a ballot.
What’s been consistent over past decades has been violence surrounding the country’s elections. The country is grappling with an increase in killings and violence from the Cameroonian military in Anglophone regions in the north west and south west of the country. Cameroon is made up of a French-speaking majority (80%) and an English-speaking minority (20%) (aka the Anglophone region). Both trace their language and culture back to the French or the British, who divided the country up in 1919 under the London Declaration. Once the country finally gained its full independence in 1960, the French regions united into the Republic of Cameroon, but Britain’s colonies split between Cameroon and neighboring Nigeria, and have felt neglected ever since. Oh, on top of the internal war to hold onto French and British legacies, the Islamic militant group Boko Haram in the far north of the country have become the most threatening terrorist group in Africa.
To get a proper sense of the atrocities taking place in Cameroon, I’ll leave you with this mini-documentary from the BBC. And hopefully we’ll have some actual results to dissect next week.
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Ireland: Sinn Féin Shock the Country
Moving onto a country where we actually have results, Ireland’s electorate shocked many analysts by propelling Sinn Féin, the main left-wing party in the country, to a second-place victory in terms of number of seats won. While they won the popular vote with 24.5 percent of the vote, Sinn Féin may still end up being locked out of government by the two incumbent centrist parties, Fine Gael and Fianna Fáil.
Credit: RTÉ 👇
Sinn Féin’s rise is surprising considering that Ireland’s economy has done well and is forecast to have one of the strongest economies in the EU in 2020. Incumbent prime minister Leo Varadkar’s continuation campaign fell flat among voters, who also punished Fianna Fáil for their role in the coalition. Together, the centrist government parties lost a combined 6.9 percent of the popular vote since the 2016 election including 21 seats. Instead, voters couldn’t overlook failing social systems affecting homelessness, soaring rents, hospital waiting times and rundown public services. Sinn Féin and the Green Party saw their vote share increase by 10.7 and 4.4 percent, respectively, and number of seats by 14 and 10, respectively.
So What Happens Next?
Well, I hope you’re patient. Weeks, if not months, of negotiations between the three largest parties and a whole lot of political manoeuvring now await. In order to remain in power, Varadkar will need to form another coalition with Fianna Fáil, except this time the latter will be the largest party. Despite their impressive performance, Sinn Féin might be happy to enter the new parliament as the main opposition to the government, as history shows that coalition partners are often punished at the following election, as they were in 2020.
Azerbaijan: More of the Same
Azerbaijan’s snap election was called because of increasing frustration that economic reforms weren’t progressing as fast as the country’s president Ilham Aliyev had hoped, and a change in personnel was supposed to be the big takeaway. But as the Central Election Commission announced the results on Monday, it doesn’t appear much will change, as 87 members of the 125-seat chamber retained their seats. International observers mostly agreed that the election lacked any real competition and failed to meet democratic standards.
You might be asking what the point of the election was, and that would be a good question, especially with the fact that the election was due in nine months anyway. President Aliyev, who has been president for 17 years, has already implemented much of the “change” that he wanted. Aliyev has been facing an internal struggle within his New Azerbaijan Party between younger loyalists and members who had reached a “pensionable age”, so he called the election to force out those from the era of his father, Heydar Aliyev, who served as president from 1993 until his death in 2003, who was then succeeded by his son, Ilham. As the full results continue to trickle out over the next few days, it’s clear that Aliyev has his strongest mandate yet, which will be bad news for democracy in the country, including the freedom of human rights activists in the country.
Next election…
Feb 16: Guinea
Past elections…
Jan 11: Taiwan — Freedom Wins, China Loses
Jan 26: Peru — When Will the Systemic Corruption End?