CENI: the HAT political marketing gait

The CENI is paramount and essential either to Andry Rajoelina’s personal definition of a consensual and inclusive transition, or to his resulting unilateral regime. Its setting up has a significant political stake: the credibility of the first ever HAT organized elections. In the making up of this poles meant to look like consensual and inclusive, the Interior ministry has opened a national task meeting to serve this goal. The meeting will focus on the reform of the electoral law, and on the CENI’s erection.   

The HAT grip on the electoral reform process is to be dreaded since it will exclusively be that of the presidency, and it will capitalize by the editing and distribution of basic documents to build on for and to participants. Proposed texts will officially stem from the Interior ministry and from the present national electoral Council or CNE, but Ambohitsorohitra clearly intending to control the debate. Indeed, whatever the outcome of this dialogue, resolutions will be turned into laws by an umpteenth presidential order. The national task meeting is actually another diversion aiming at granting a shadow of legitimacy to the Rajoelina mobility’s patched up electoral law, and relevance to the legislative polls meant to be held in March 2010. That is, ladies and gents, the art of political marketing.  

The impact of the urgently erected CENI will be less significant. The Interior ministry’s Secretary has already announced that the government is progressively going to step aside from the organization of the vote. Cécile Manorohanta insisted, however, on the fact that the whole process will not be entrusted to this independent institution, and that her department keeps in control of the heart of the electoral preparation. As a logical conclusion, the forthcoming legislative election organized by the HAT and the Rajoelina mobility will not go down as a bookmark in history. The role dedicated to the CENI is likely to be merely symbolic, definitely meant to make a politically dominated vote’s face up  

Minister Manorohanta carefully kept away form revealing anything either about this institution’s future activities and mission. The CENI will, anyway, not be so much relevant as long as the Interior ministry remains in command. “The ideal scrip would be making the CENI fully in charge of everything”, she argued, and by the same way conceding the impossibility to capitalize in a so short time the Andry Rajoelina’s promised changes back on the place of May 13th. This step by step hesitant march is again a political strategy serving the full control of the electoral machine until having a makeshift but real majority from the poles. The de facto authorities and their allies have repeatedly been claiming popularity based but virtual majority during one year.  

So how does one do to skirt around the rules, alter them and make it look like thoroughly legal all the way? The Interior ministry is standing by political parties and the civilian society originated proposals. The enforced reforms’ credibility prior to the elections is likely to enjoy hard days. It might not prove quite easy to convince the national and international opinions of the polls’ transparency when assignments basically dedicated to the CENI are time and time again controlled by the administration. It will all be a matter of creating a small young institution that will grow tall, and be ripe in time for the presidential election, isn’t it? So does it not come up to sacrificing the shadow of legitimacy supposed to be granted by a mature CENI?