MUSICIAN MARTELLY ELECTED HAITI'S NEXT PRESIDENT; NOW WHAT?
(AOL) - By Emily Troutman, Contributor
Musician Michel Martelly was overwhelmingly elected the next president of Haiti, according to preliminary results announced today. Martelly received 67 percent of the votes to his opponent Mirlande Manigat's 32 percent.
This percentage closely mirrored the results Martelly's campaign announced earlier in the week, based on its own analysis of the tally sheets. Final results will be announced April 16.
Richardson Dumel, the spokesman for the electoral council, was supposed to announce the results, but he called in sick, saying he needed rest.
It was a tense election period, marked by notable fraud in the first round followed by violent protests, and the deep, angry malaise of homelessness and a slow recovery from the Jan. 12, 2010, earthquake.
Martelly was the candidate of change. The well-loved carnival singer won decisively based mostly on his outsider status, folksy grassroots rhetoric and a sophisticated campaign run by foreign consultants.
Voters in Haiti sported pink plastic bracelets, in the style of the Livestrong campaign, which first popularized them. Martelly courted donations and support from the large Haitian diaspora and took to the airwaves on live Facebook chats.
In Haiti, his message resonated with bored, unemployed, disaffected youth who flocked to hear Martelly's straight talk. Manigat, a 70-year-old professor and graduate of the Sorbonne, held the lead after the first round of votes, but in the second round struggled to connect with some voters.
In an interview with AOL News on Election Day two weeks ago, Manigat acknowledged, "People see me in a certain way. People that know me say I'm always smiling. But now [critics] say I seem aloof, intellectual. I didn't speak the grassroots Creole."
From her campaign, she said she learned "patience, understanding." She was often challenged at public events by Martelly's supporters, who jeered her and shouted Martelly's slogan, "Tet kale!" like a battle cry.
"The last meeting I had in Mirebalais, when Martelly's people disturbed it, and I went out, I was not angry," she said. "I was preoccupied. I had a deep preoccupation. ... There was a crescendo in the way violence has been used."
International monitors noted a diminution of violence and fraud during the second round of votes, though cities such as the coastal town of Jacmel faced numerous days of roadblocks after the mayor endorsed Martelly.
Manigat's supporters painted Martelly as an "immoral," "vagabond" candidate, but that only seemed to help him. Young people, especially, said they were fed up with the status quo, the political elite and Manigat's coterie of longtime political insiders like the senator, Youri Latortue.
The earthquake marked a sea change in Haiti's political expectations. Faced with miles of rubble and hundreds of thousands of people still homeless from the quake, voters felt their last best hope was a wild-card candidate.
Though Martelly's style was bold, his campaign promises were typical for Haiti. He spoke frequently about the need for improved agriculture, education and job creation.
He also promised a solution to the complex land-titling system, which locked many of the earthquake-displaced into a vicious cycle of poverty, either squatting on dangerous land or paying exorbitant rental fees to fake or unscrupulous owners.
Martelly's 67 percent of the vote is nearly unprecedented in Haiti and a clear mandate for his leadership, assuming the tabulation holds up in the final announcement April 16.
Now Haiti wants to know, what can you do for me?
I revisited the towns of Fermathe and Kenscoff, above Port-au-Prince where AOL News was with Martelly as he walked up the long hillside road to campaign in November. His father is from the area and he spent much of his youth there. Voters supported Martelly and today their shared their vision for the future of their town, their country and their families.
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