Parties, elections, representation, MZ vs. US

There are so many political parties in Mozambique.

Just look at this list.

I can think of a handful of US political parties: Democratic Party, Republican Party, Green Party, Independent Party, Libertarian Party, Socialist Party…there may be more. But it just doesn’t seem like we have enough to fill a page with.

Many of Mozambique’s political parties were founded after 1990, in a time where the civil war in the country was coming to an end and the main opposition to the indepence-era FRELIMO was the group RENAMO, that faced the challenge of becoming a political party where it once was an armed guerrilla resistance movement (the acronym actually stands for ‘Mozambican National Resistance’).

Mozambique has had three national, presidential elections since 1994, and is about the have it’s fourth national election as an independent ‘democratic’ nation. The FRELIMO candidate has taken the presidency in every election, but for some reason this hasn’t caused RENAMO to revert back to violence or other dramatic tactics. There is value placed on the electoral system.

One thing that interests me, in fact I’ve been thinking a lot about it over the past week, is Mozambique’s system of proportional representation (PR). We don’t have this system in the US, indeed I wish we did; we have another system often referred to as a plurality or first/furthest past the post system (FPTP).

Let’s start with our system, since I’m familiar with it.

In the US, we give the election win to whomever receives the most amount of votes, regardless of whether they won the majority of votes or not.

So there could be 5 candidates for a slot: a democrat, a republican, an independent, a green party candidate, and a libertarian.

The republican candidate could win with only 21% of the vote, even though they are not supported by the other 79% of the voting public. The first person with the most votes wins. Winner takes all, nothing else is divided up.

This often leads to the lamentable argument among friends and relatives, coworkers etc. of persuading others to not “throw away” their vote. The theory is that if you vote for the green party, libertarian party etc., they will never win because they are not likely or expected to win, so you are just taking your vote away from the plurality that the best “likely” candidate needs to get “past the post”.

Excuse all of the parenthesis, this is how I usually talk in person.

In any case, it’s a terrible choice to have to make.

If you’re like me, and you hate partisan politics in the US, you’ll agree and know exactly what I’m talking about. How many times have you heard someone say that they were going to vote for the “lesser of two evils”? I’ve heard it a lot.

So, what about proportional representation?

In Mozambique they work with party lists. That is to say that the party, be it FRELIMO, MDM, RENAMO, etc. will compose a list of 10 or so candidates that they rank from the top down in order or preference, and votes will vote for their parties list. This means that if FRELIMO gets, for example, 50% of the vote for their assembly seats (the equivalent of parliament), that numbers 1-5 on their list will be represented for that district. The rest get divied up between the remaining percentages of voters, but there is a 5% minimum to receive representation.*

*update, Manning in her lecture to our class says that this threshold has since been lowered to something like 1%.

I may not be explaining this perfectly, and I hope someone will correct me if I’m wrong, but essentially this seems to be the system and it also appears much better than an all-or-nothing system.

The presidential systems between our two countries are also a little different.

In Mozambique the president has to win with an absolute majority. In other words if the example I gave above of the politician winning in the US with only 21% were a presidential election in Mozambique, Mozambique would take the politician with 21% and the next highest voted for candidate (let’s say with 18%) and would hold a run-off election for just those two candidates, forcing a majority vote for one or the other.

In the US, we have an appalling lack of party diversity, but if we did, we would still have elected as president the person with 21% of the vote. (Well, electoral college matters aside).

The point is that we don’t have run-offs, we have a the-best-of-the-losers system for most politics: First Past the Post.

In Mozambique another difference in the presidency is that the president nominates the head of parliament (assambleia nacional da republica) and also the council of ministers that help to run the country. The head of parliament is not separate from the presidency and therefore does not act as a check to presidential power (See Carrie Manning, “Semi-presidentialism and the preservation of ambiguity in post-war Mozambique”).

However many other things are similar… for example Mozambique has 5 year presidential term limits.

The constitution of Mozambique is constantly changing. The most recent versions of the constitution have been from 1990 and 2004, although amendments and supplementary laws seem to come up frequently.

I haven’t had time to figure out the difference between Mozambique’s constitutional basis and the US’s constitutional basis, but I will. Maybe tomorrow..