Election of the Day: Malawi

On Tuesday, September 16th, citizens of the warm heart of Africa, aka the Republic of Malawi, will elect a president, as well as all 229 seats in the National Assembly and a number of other local offices. This election will determine the composition of the assembly, as each seat is determined via single member districts, first past the post. The presidency, thanks to a 2020 Constitutional Court ruling (more on that below), requires 50%+1, so no candidate obtains an outright majority, a runoff will be held within 30 days.

A runoff may not be necessary, despite the presence of seventeen candidates on the ballot for the presidency. There are two clear frontrunners, who are facing off for the fourth time in 12 years: Lazarus Chakwera, of the Malawi Congress Party, who has served as president since winning the last election in 2020 decisively (59-40) over his past and future opponent, Peter Mutharika of the Democratic Progressive Party, who served as president from 2014-2020.

Let’s begin with the challenger, Mutharika. It should be noted, in accordance with LGM’s official position as gerontocracy-skeptical, that at 85 Mutharika is a bit long in the tooth to be signing up for a stressful job with a roughly five year commitment, but he didn’t consult us. Born in 1940, Mutharika had an extensive and successful career as both a practicing lawyer and law professor focusing on international law. He earned degrees from the University of London and Yale, and taught international law at an impressive collection of universities around the world: Rutgers and WUSTL in the US, the London School of Economics, The University of Dar es Salaam in Tanzania, Makerere University in Uganda, and Haile Selassie University in Ethiopia. In the 90’s, while a professor at WUSTL, he advocated for increasing limits on the powers of the office of the presidency in his home country during a period of constitutional reform. His introduction to politics came in 2005, when he retired from his academic career and became an advisor to his older brother, Bingu wa Mutharika, who was elected president in 2004 and overwhelmingly re-elected in 2009. Roughly half-way through his second term, his brother, then 78, suffered a fatal heart attack, creating a minor constitutional crisis. In his final year of life, Bingu wa Mutharika had been consolidating power, and attempting to orchestrate a scheme in which his brother would be the DPP nominee in 2014, skipping over his Vice President, Joyce Banda. Banda was well aware of this scheme and was not on board, leading Bingu wa Mutharika to “fire” her. The quotes signify what you might expect; presidents cannot simply fire vice presidents in Malawi, they must be impeached. DPP did not have the numbers in the assembly to impeach, and other parties had no interest in assisting them by going along with a sham impeachment in the service of an intra-party power grab. The courts reinstated her as vice president, even as she was removed from her position as #2 in the DPP. She was already preparing to run for president in 2014 under a new party of her creation. The constitutional crisis, about 48 hours long, was about Mutharika and the rest of the cabinet conspiring to hide the fact of Bingu wa Mutharika’s death from the public while they plotted to bypass Banda and instill a DPP loyalist, probably Peter Mutharika, as president. Ultimately, there was no plausible pathway to do so, the scheme fell apart, and Banda became president. Her presidency was a bit of a corrupt mess. Her sin was less personal corruption, which was within the normal/tolerable range, and more appointing a wildly corrupt cabinet, compelling her to fire them en masse). She was pretty unpopular in 2014, and ultimately finished 3rd with only 20% of the vote behind Mutharika (36%) and Chakwera (28%).

Mutharika’s presidency was pretty meh. He offered some reduced corruption and relative stability compared to Banda, but there as still enough corruption for Chakwera to capitalize on it. His infrastructure projects weren’t terribly well executed and economic growth was stagnant at best. As a cautious technocratic anti-populist politician by temperament, he struggled to keep his popularity up with few results to point to, going into the 2019 election in a seemingly weak position. He nonetheless somewhat unexpectedly seemingly pulled it out, defeating Chakwere again by about 3%, 39-35, with another challenger, Saulos Chilima of the United Transformation Movement, picking up 20%. (Chilima had been a DPP member until about 10 months before the election, when he left the party and launched his own.) This result led to a series of protests across the country, and a number of accusation of electoral fraud on a significant scale. Both Chakwere and Chilima posed legal challenges about the election results, while a youth protest movement called “Jane Ansah must fall” kept protests against the election results going for months. (Jane Ansah was the chairperson of the Malawi electoral commission, and widely believed to have orchestrated the electoral fraud on Mutharika’s behalf.)

It turned out, the case for fraud had merit. on February 3rd, 2020, after 8 months of waiting, the constitution court issued a ruling overturning the election results. They took the rather extraordinary step of reading their entire 500 page ruling aloud from the bench, taking turns, for over seven hours. (In addition to overturning the election, this ruling also established a requirement that the president win a majority of votes, and a runoff election if the leading candidate did not meet that threshold. Their ruling was that this should have been done all along, and the FPTP was a based on a flawed interpretation of the Constitution.) Central to the decision was the discovery of the widespread use of Tipp-ex, a form of correction fluid/white-out, altering numbers of tally sheets after they had been signed by the relevant authorities. Malawi’s constitutional court seems to be widely considered to be one of the more independent and non-corrupt in in Africa, and the ruling seems generally well-respected internationally. Mutharika denounced the ruling as an affront to democracy, naturally, and appealed it. But after his appeals failed he urged calm acceptance from his followers and prepared for the re-run election. The court’s ruling neither blamed Mutharika directly for the fraud, nor it didn’t exonerate him either, and the cloud of suspicion did not serve him well in his 3rd election against Chakwere. He lost 59-40. Chilima endorsed Chakwere and ran as his vice presidential candidate, an office he held until he died in a tragic plane crash last year.

Chakwere, like Mutharika, came to politics from an academic background. A Pentacostal minister and theologian, he wrapped his social conservatism and economic redistribution-focused populism in fiery moralistic rhetoric, but as a president he’s made little substantive progress and seen his popularity erode. One might think the relatively underwhelming presidencies of both men might open the door to a challenger emerging on Tuesday, but that is not expected; both the DPP and Chakwere’s MCP have extensive patronage networks and benefit from ethnic voting patterns that give them both a very high floor. I could only find two polls. One showed Mutharika with a 10% lead; the other Chakwere with a 20% lead. In conclusion, I have no idea what to expect, and I’m not sure who I should be rooting for.