As 2023 drew toward its close, discussions about a Transitional Presidential Council as a mechanism for broader political legitimacy in Haiti gained momentum, with CARICOM, the United States, and some Haitian political actors exploring whether a council representing multiple political tendencies could provide a more legitimate governance framework than Henry’s sole leadership while maintaining the institutional continuity needed for security and electoral operations.
The council concept drew on precedents from other transitional governance arrangements globally and from the Montana Accord’s own transitional proposals. The idea was to create a body that included representatives of major Haitian political and civil society groupings, that could provide collective oversight of a government still headed by Henry or a successor, and that would have the legitimacy to make decisions about the electoral process that no single actor could credibly make alone.
Skeptics argued that the council concept faced the same fundamental obstacle as previous political proposals: the deep mutual distrust among Haitian political actors, and the difficulty of designing an arrangement that all parties could accept without any single actor believing they were being disadvantaged. The history of Haitian political negotiations was littered with agreements that collapsed at the implementation stage.
Nonetheless, the emergence of the council concept as a focus of serious political discussion represented a recognition that the current arrangement — Henry governing alone without any legitimating political structure — was not sustainable. The question was whether the recognition of the problem could be translated into the political will and design capacity needed to create a solution that would actually work in Haiti’s extraordinarily challenging political environment.