International pressure on Haiti to organize elections intensified in May 2021, with the United States, the Core Group of ambassadors, and the Organization of American States all calling on the Moïse government to commit to a credible electoral process that would restore democratic governance and provide the political legitimacy that Haiti’s institutions desperately needed. The calls came against a backdrop of deteriorating security and deepening political polarization that made the feasibility of elections in the near term deeply questionable.
The Biden administration, which had taken office in January with promises of a more supportive approach to democratic governance and human rights globally, was navigating a delicate position on Haiti. Supporting elections was consistent with its democratic values agenda, but endorsing an electoral process in Haiti’s current security environment risked legitimizing an outcome that would lack genuine popular participation and credibility.
Haitian civil society organizations offered a more skeptical assessment of the international push for elections. Many argued that elections conducted without adequate security, in the absence of civic education, without independent electoral institutions, and under a president whose constitutional legitimacy was contested could not produce the democratic renewal that Haiti needed. Form without substance, they warned, was worse than no elections at all.
The debate over elections in 2021 exposed fundamental tensions in how the international community understood democracy in fragile states — whether the holding of an election was itself a democratic achievement regardless of the conditions under which it was conducted, or whether genuine democracy required the prior establishment of security, rule of law, and institutional legitimacy.