ARTICLE - NEW WIND IN HAITI

'NEW WIND' PROPELS MARTELLY TO HAITIAN PRESIDENCY
(Toronto Star) - By Kenneth Kidd

Their anger has festered for more than a year, as Haitians lurched from earthquake to cholera to hurricanes, their squalor seemingly undiminished despite all the pledges of international aid.

So many blue-helmeted UN soldiers patrolling the streets, so many SUVs ferrying foreign aid workers hither and yon, and yet so little concrete change.

You just knew all that frustration would explode at some point, but now it’s done so through an outlet once thought unimaginable: the ballot box.

In electing Michel “Sweet Micky” Martelly as their next president, Haitians have voted for a walking repudiation of everything Haiti has stood for and been.

Preliminary figures released Monday show Martelly topping former first lady Mirlande Manigat by a three-to-one margin in the presidential run-off that followed November’s botched elections, in which fraud had vied with disorganization for top billing.

Manigat, the 70-year-old with a Sorbonne education, often spoke of the country having to choose between “two completely different candidates,” but even that observation can seem like understatement.

At 50, Martelly isn’t just a man with no political experience, he’s an anti-politician — albeit one cleverly packaged as such, during the runoff, by the Washington-based political strategists at Ostos & Sola.

Hugely popular as a kompa singer, Martelly was best known for his cross-dressing on stage, the bad boy who would sport diapers, guzzle booze or drop his pants mid-performance.

The admitted cocaine use in the past, the repossessed houses in Florida, none of it seemed to matter. After decades of corruption and misrule in Haiti, the rhetorical question was always out there: How could Martelly possibly do any worse?

Voting for him became, in essence, a way of giving the finger to all of Haiti’s failed politicians of the past as well as the international community.

As Martelly liked to boast at campaign rallies: “We represent this new wind.”

In doing so, Martelly also managed to tap into the base of twice-ousted president Jean-Bertrand Aristide, among the country’s poorest, naturally desperate for any kind of change and at least a sliver of hope.

And glamour sealed it, with the likes of Wyclef Jean and Busta Rhymes so often at Martelly’s side.

But in riding a wave of anger and hope, Martelly has also raised expectations in a country that tends to punish those who fail in delivery.

As Martelly’s cousin, the singer Richard Morse, told the Star last year: “They say that Haiti is terre glise — slippery earth. You can be standing tall and slip and fall, because it’s slippery.”

Martelly might have won the presidency, but the INITE party of outgoing president René Préval still dominates Haiti’s parliament.

And the presence in the country of two men recently returned from exile — the left-leaning Aristide and former dictator Jean-Claude “Baby Doc” Duvalier — does nothing to dampen the prospect of political volatility.

Haiti’s election in March may have gone smoothly, as least compared with past efforts, but it’s still a place where quiet streets can suddenly explode in violent protest, where several hundred thousand people are still living under tents and tarpaulins in punishing poverty.

Can Martelly deliver?

His major planks involve restoring Haiti’s disbanded army, boosting agriculture and reviving a tourism industry that’s been virtually dormant for years.

None of which he’ll be able to do on his own: Haiti’s coffers are all but empty, the economy moribund.

So, ironically, the next iteration of Martelly can’t be the one that moons his audiences in concert, but the crisply-suited one who showed up for interviews in Montreal more than a year ago, the event that arguably gave Martelly the initial steam he needed.

It’s no small point that, until that visit, most Haitians didn’t know Martelly spoke flawless French, not just Créole.

If the prospect of a presidential election had put a lot of aid and development money on hold, it’s this polished version of Martelly who will have to get it flowing again.

He will, in short, have to appear to the world differently than he does to the ordinary Haitians who voted for him.