Haiti Gets Its First President Since 2021 Assassination

Haiti’s transitional council named former senate president Edgard Gardy Leblanc Fils as temporary president of the nation on Tuesday and tapped former youth minister Fritz Belizaire as interim prime minister.

Fils and Belizaire are scheduled to hold their offices until February 2026, when the security situation in Haiti will hopefully have been stabilized enough to hold nationwide elections.

Belizaire will take over from Michel Patrick Boisvert, the former finance minister named interim prime minister by de facto Prime Minister Ariel Henry when he tendered his formal resignation last week.

Haiti has not had an elected leader since President Jovenel Moïse was assassinated in July 2021. Henry took over as the nation’s chief executive after the assassination and became deeply unpopular with the Haitian people, with many viewing him as a corrupt despot who would do anything to cling to power. He resisted holding elections and refused to resign until February, when street gangs plunged the country into bloody chaos while the prime minister was in Africa, effectively exiling him from the country.

Henry said he would not resign until a transitional council was established to create an interim government. After months of effort, the seven-member council (plus two non-voting observers) was finally sworn in on April 25 amid fresh outbreaks of street violence and death threats from gang leaders. Henry resigned the same day, without admitting he had ever done anything wrong.

The transitional council was originally scheduled to choose a president by March 25, but the process was delayed by both political squabbles and threats from the gangs.

“Long discussions among interest groups within the political structure hindered consensus despite the severity of Haiti’s crisis. Some members even boycotted the votes,” as the Haitian Times delicately put it on Wednesday.

The deadlock was finally broken when four members of the transitional council, representing four of Haiti’s largest political coalitions, formed a bloc to push a presidential selection through. The leader of that bloc was Edgard Leblanc Fils, and the bloc went on to name him president.

Fils is a formal presidential candidate who belongs to an alliance called the January 30 Political Parties collective that was opposed to Ariel Henry’s government. Another member of the council, Frinel Joseph, praised him as a “well-known” candidate who would skillfully “coordinate” the interim government’s efforts.

The first major step was choosing a prime minister. This was done with surprising speed on Tuesday.

Audible murmurs of surprise and unease were heard from observers in the council chamber when Fils led his four-member bloc to steamroll the other council members and install Belizaire, just minutes after his name was floated as a possible candidate. The beginning of the transitional council was inexplicably delayed for two hours; when the members finally took their seats, they apologized for the delay, and then appointed Fils and Belizaire in rapid succession.

Fils insisted Belizaire was a “very good choice for prime minister” and said the situation in Haiti was so dire that delays for political wheeling and dealing to fill the office could not be tolerated. The president declared his allies on the council made a swift choice as a means of “publicly recognizing the suffering” of the Haitian people.

“The important thing for us is this will, this determination to go beyond divisions, to overcome conflicts and to reach a consensus,” he said.

“The Haitian population can no longer wait. The security issue is essential for societal calm,” seconded another member of the council, Louis Gerald Gilles.

Belizaire is a rather obscure figure whose claim to fame was serving as sports minister from 2006 to 2011. One of the transitional council members flatly stated “I don’t know him” when the Associated Press (AP) asked if he supported the new prime minister. People interviewed on the streets of Port-au-Prince could only say that his name sounded vaguely familiar.

“He’s kind of an unknown figure. He doesn’t seem to have his own constituency. Maybe that made him the likely prime minister so different parties can accept him as prime minister,” ventured Haiti expert Robert Fatton of the University of Virginia.

Other observers worried that the hasty appointment of an unknown prime minister through an exercise of raw political power was the last thing Haiti needed. Haiti Libre immediately declared Fils an “unelected” president and Belizaire a “contested” prime minister.

The other three members of the transitional council indicated they might contest Belizaire’s appointment as a violation of the April 2024 agreement that brought the council into existence and might even resign from the council if their challenge is unsuccessful.

Fils’ four-member alliance signed an agreement called the “Constitution of an Indissoluble Majority Bloc Within the Presidential Council” on Wednesday that essentially declared their intention to make decisions without the consensus of the other three members whenever necessary.

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A civil society group called the Montana Accord blasted the appointments of Fils and Belizaire as a “plot” hatched “in the middle of the night” by the same corrupt forces that have long kept Haiti in misery.

“The political and economic mafia forces have decided to take control of the presidential council and the government so that they can continue to control the state,” the Montana Accord declared on Wednesday.

A Haitian electrician named Jean Selce told the AP he was not surprised to see the same old political games playing out in the transitional council and its interim administration, especially since some members of the transitional council were fronted by the same parties that have mis-governed Haiti for decades.

“Their past is not really positive,” Selce said of the Haitian political class. “I hope their mentality can change, but I don’t believe it will. They don’t really love the country. Who’s dying right now? It’s Haitians like me.”

As for the gangs that have inflicted so much death and suffering on Haiti over the past few months, they are still describing themselves as revolutionaries who are prepared to burn what remains of Port-au-Prince to the ground unless they are given seats at the ruling table.

“Our dream is to get rid of the oligarchs who prevent the country from progressing,” gang leader Vitel’homme Innocent, a most-wanted fugitive from the FBI for abducting 17 Christian missionaries in 2021, told CNN on Tuesday.

Innocent dismissed the long string of rapes and murders he has been accused of by Haitian officials as a few “mistakes” he made along the way – some of them supposedly made at the behest of legitimate international powers like the CARICOM Caribbean alliance – to becoming a righteous anti-corruption fighter. He vowed to continue his campaign of destruction if he and his fellow “revolutionaries” are not made part of the new government.

“You will understand that when you realize that planes cannot fly. When you see that investors cannot come in. When you analyze that there are a bunch of foreigners who were already in the country with projects who were forced to flee to their countries to wait for stability,” he said.