History of Elections Podcast

The 2000 Egyptian legislative election was held at the height of President Hosni Mubarak’s rule, and drew a spotlight onto the nature and limitations of his regime’s control over Egypt.
Transcript:
Hello and welcome to episode 6 of the History of Elections Podcast, where we will be looking back at the 2000 legislative election in Egypt. Held at the height of President Hosni Mubarak’s 30-year authoritarian rule, the election drew a spotlight onto the nature and, perhaps, the limitations of Mubarak’s rule over Egypt.
November, 2000. The United States is thrown into political chaos after the presidential election between George W. Bush and Al Gore hinges on a recount in Florida; Alberto Fujimori, the autocratic president of Peru, flees the country over allegations of corruption and crimes against humanity; Jharkand is created as the 28th state of India, having been carved out of Bihar; a horrific funicular fire in the Austrian Alpine mountains kills 155 people; the first long-term expedition is launched to the International Space Station, beginning 25 years and counting of continuous activity; and, in Egypt, voters go to the polls to nominally elect their next parliament.
Background
By the turn of the millennium, Egypt had been ruled by its president, Hosni Mubarak, for 19 years. Mubarak was the inheritor of the authoritarian regime that had been established by Gamal Abdel Nasser following the 1952 coup, which had overthrown the Egyptian monarchy and brought an end to British imperial influence in Egypt. The coup, part of what has come to be known as the Egyptian Revolution, had a profound effect on the Arab World—as we discussed two episodes ago, the ideas of Pan-Arabism and Nasserism heavily influenced the Ba’athist states that emerged in Syria and Iraq in the 1960s.
Nasser ruled Egypt as a presidential one-party state until his death of a heart attack in 1970, at the age of just 52. The sole legal party went through several iterations and, by the time of his death, was known as the Arab Socialist Union. It embodied the core ideas of Nasserism: pan-Arabism, nationalism, socialism, anti-imperialism and anti-Zionism. He was succeeded by his vice president and the former parliamentary speaker, Anwar Sadat, who emerged as a compromise candidate between competing powerbrokers within the regime.
Upon consolidating power in his own right, Sadat pursued a programme of relative liberalisation of both the Egyptian economy and political system. The country was opened up to foreign investment and new incentives for private enterprise were introduced, moving away from the strict socialist underpinnings of Nasser’s rule.
Sadat purged the government of the most hardline Nasserists and relaxed restrictions on the country’s substantial Islamist movement, which was led by the Egyptian branch of the Muslim Brotherhood, who we last met in Syria in episode 4. The Muslim Brotherhood had been founded in 1928 but had been banned under Nasser. Although Sadat did not formally unban the organisation, he initially showed greater tolerance for its activities, hoping to gain an ally against parts of the political left that opposed him.
He implemented a new constitution that, on paper, cemented the rule of law, but also strengthened the powers of the presidency. His most notable political reform was to end the one-party system, with the first multi-party election in 29 years taking place in 1979. The Arab Socialist Union itself was reformulated as the National Democratic Party, or NDP, dropping the titular commitment to Arab socialism and committing, on paper, to democracy—an important ideological move as the party shifted to a more centrist position, though it maintained its secularist orientation.
Nevertheless, Sadat and the NDP kept a firm hold on the state, and the new multi-party elections were not genuine contests for political power; rather, the presence of opposition parties was intended to provide a democratic façade to help legitimise the regime, both domestically and internationally—what Eberhard Keinle described as “a mere update of authoritarianism.” Indeed, at around this time, Sadat is alleged to have described Nasser and himself as “the last pharaohs”.
Presidential elections remained plebiscites with just one candidate on the ballot, who was nominated by a two-thirds vote of the legislature—similar to the system used by Ba’athist Syria that I described in episode 4. Such a system was clearly designed with the assumption that the regime would always control a two-thirds majority in the legislature.
It would be foreign policy that most shaped and determined the fate of Sadat’s presidency. In the context of the Cold War, he moved Egypt away from the Soviet orbit and pursued closer ties with the United States. After Egypt suffered a third military defeat against Israel in 1973, Sadat took the controversial step of seeking a unilateral peace agreement. This culminated in the Camp David Accords of 1978. Brokered by US President Jimmy Carter, the accords saw Egypt formally recognise Israel and agree to a peace treaty in exchange for regaining the Sinai peninsula—which had been occupied by Israel since 1967—and, further down the line, substantial American military aid.
Sadat won the Nobel Peace Prize for the peace treaty but was fiercely condemned across the Arab World for unilaterally recognising Israel, particularly in the absence of a solution to Israeli-Palestinian conflict. Egypt was suspended from the Arab League—the body’s headquarters relocating to Tunisia—and Egypt stopped receiving oil subsidies from Gulf states. Egypt’s role as a figurehead for the Pan-Arab movement came to a decisive end, creating a void that the Ba’athist states of Syria and Iraq—and also, to an extent, Saudi Arabia—would attempt to fill.
The peace agreement also ended Sadat’s hopes of reconciling with Egypt’s Islamist movement; fiercely condemned by the Muslim Brotherhood, he resorted to renewed persecution of the organisation and other Islamist groups. In particular, the state began to crackdown on jihadist organisations, which had grown in influence throughout the 1970s and explicitly plotted to overthrow Sadat.
These developments precipitated Sadat’s downfall. During a military parade in 1981 to mark Egypt’s initial victories against Israel during the 1973 war, Sadat was assassinated during an attack by members of one such jihadist group—the Egyptian Islamic Jihad—who were motivated by the peace treaty with Israel. The assassination was intended to spark a wider uprising that would overthrow the secular state, but the only rebellion to actually take place, in the city of Asyut, was quickly put down by security forces.
Mubarak’s Presidency
This brings us to Hosni Mubarak. After rising through the ranks of the Egyptian air force, Mubarak had become Sadat’s vice president in 1975. Mubarak had gained national fame for his role in Egypt’s initially successful offensive against Israel in 1973 and began to portray himself as part of a younger generation that had come to prominence in the post-revolutionary era—he was himself ten years younger than both Sadat and Nasser.
Mubarak, who was also injured during the attack on Sadat, assumed the presidency on Sadat’s death, becoming Egypt’s fourth president. A presidential election was arranged within a week with Mubarak the sole candidate on the ballot; official figures showed that he “won” the referendum with 98% of the vote.
Mubarak went on to “win” uncontested presidential elections in 1986, 1993 and 1999. His vote share in those elections fell to 97%, 96% and then all the way down to 93% in 1999. I suspect he was not unduly concerned by that decline, but it did mark a trend.
Again, to draw comparisons with the Syrian system that I described two episodes ago, the regime cast a somewhat less tight net over the political movements that were allowed to contest elections. Egypt was generally perceived to be ruled by a relatively more liberal and constitutional system than its Syrian counterpart, an image that sometimes suited Mubarak’s regime.
At various points during his rule, Mubarak’s Egypt was cited as an example of a gradually democratising state. Such assessments veered on the naïve—or, on the part of some American analysts, displayed motivated reasoning to support an allied government. Other commentators and political scientists argued that the Middle East had proved immune to what was sometimes described as the “third wave of democratisation” from the 1970s that occurred across Europe, Latin America and Africa.
According to the V-Dem electoral democracy index, which grades countries based on how free and fair their elections are on a scale from 0 to 1, by 2000, Egypt scored just 0.22. That was ahead of the score of 0.15 in Syria—which, in the same year, elected Bashar al-Assad to his first term of office—but it was well below the global average of 0.49, or the African average of 0.36. Egypt’s annual electoral democracy rating had remained pretty steady under Mubarak.
However, as president Mubarak expanded the security state and continued to suppress Islamist movements, especially from the 1990s. He himself survived multiple assassination attempts, including an attack in Port Said in 1999, when he was injured by an assassin wielding a knife. Mubarak also oversaw a continuing military campaign against Islamist militants, with an annual death toll in the 1990s rising to the hundreds.
The regime made use of a continuous state of emergency that had been enacted after Sadat’s assassination to bypass constitutional protections for human rights. Arbitrary arrests and the use of torture was common and there was widespread detention of opponents of the regime and dissidents, as well as increasing use of military trials. Newspapers were regularly shut down, public demonstrations banned and human rights activists jailed.
The regime also exercised wide control over Egyptian civil society. It controlled the appointment of university deans and village leaders while ensuring subservient leadership among trade unions and professional organisations. Islamic institutions were also controlled by the state—religious leaders gained the nickname of “pulpit parrots” for their promotion of regime narratives.
Mubarak portrayed himself, particularly to the west and United States, as a modern, secular bulwark against radical Islamism seizing control of the Arab World’s most populous country. That argument had been strengthened by the precedent of Algeria, where a secular regime had been fighting a bloody civil war against a popular Islamist movement since 1992. However, Mubarak lacked the ideological zeal and purpose of Nasser or even Sadat. William Cleveland and Martin Bunton described Mubarak’s regime as one “that had no purpose other than to stay in power” and Mubarak himself as a president who “inspired little popular confidence.”
The economy grew rapidly under Mubarak. He maintained the mixed-economy approach developed under Sadat with a heavy emphasis on the public sector; in 1986, 35% of the labour force was employed by the state. Between 1981 and 2000, Egypt’s GDP nearly tripled, a slowdown in the early 1990s notwithstanding. However, the country’s booming population—rising from 45 million to 73 million in the same period—meant that per capita GDP growth less marked. There was also widespread corruption; by 2011, Mubarak’s family was estimated to be worth 70 billion US dollars.
Foreign policy remained a core concern for Egypt under Mubarak’s leadership. He upheld Sadat’s peace treaty with Israel and continued to benefit from American military aid, which was numbered in the billions of dollars. Notably, Egypt maintained the peace treaty and declined to intervene when Israel invaded Lebanon in 1982. Nevertheless, relations remained cold. He visited Israel only once, in 1995, to attend the funeral of Israel’s assassinated Prime Minister, Yitzhak Rabin—leaving the country after just a few hours. He also re-established ties with the Soviet Union in the 1980s, seeking to avoid being tied entirely to either Cold War superpower.
Mubarak rebuilt relations with the Arab world, particularly Saudi Arabia. This effort was aided by the Iranian revolution, after which Egypt loosely aligned itself with forces that were opposed to the new Iranian government. Mubarak provided military and economic support to Saddam Hussein’s Iraq during its war against Iran.
Legislative Elections under Mubarak
Since 1980, Egypt had possessed a bicameral legislature, with the lower house People’s Assembly and the upper house Shura Council. In the People’s Assembly, 10 of about 450 MPs were appointed by the president, while a third of the Shura Council’s members were appointed. Each legislature was elected in separate elections. The parliament possessed very few real powers and lacked the capacity to place a check on the president’s power.
Mubarak’s National Democratic Party remained dominant in legislative elections, although candidates from alternative parties and independent candidates were tolerated to varying degrees. Mubarak continued the façade of political liberalisation and elections became slightly more open than during the Nasser and Sadat eras. For example, he unbanned the liberal and secular Wafd Party—one of Egypt’s oldest parties, which had played a key role in Egyptian politics in the 1920s and 1930s. After some legal difficulties, the New Wafd Party began contesting elections from 1984. In the 1987 legislative election, about 20% of elected MPs represented opposition parties, and the number of legal parties in this period rose to 16.
Nevertheless, no serious opposition to the regime was tolerated. Indeed, after a period of initial openness during the 1980s, Mubarak began to reintroduce controls on political activity and use methods such as patronage and electoral fraud to prevent any opposition movement from growing too influential. No applications to form a new political party were accepted by the state’s Political Parties Committee in the 1990s. One such rejection was for a proposed “Center Party” aimed at bringing together politically moderate Muslims and Christians in support of democratic reform. By 1995, the NDP and allied independent MPs had recovered to 94% representation in the People’s Assembly.
For the regime, elections provided opportunities to legitimate its rule, re-establish patronage relationships and distribute resources to supporters. Mona El-Ghobashy described Mubarak-era elections as “rare moments of open, if unequal, political competition between government and opposition,” which opposition movements generally considered to be worth participating in, particularly after a failed boycott in 1990.
Meanwhile, the regime once again attempted to pursue a rapprochement with the Muslim Brotherhood, seeking to reconcile moderate Islamists in order to isolate more radical movements. The Muslim Brotherhood still faced some periodic repression but its professional, charitable and student networks were able to operate to various degrees and began building an increasingly large following across Egyptian society.
The Muslim Brotherhood was not allowed to formally contest elections, but, from the mid-1980s, some of its members were permitted to contest legislative elections as independent candidates, some of whom were even able to win election. By the end of the decade, independent Islamists formed the largest opposition bloc in the People’s Assembly. The rapprochement would be partially reversed in the 1990s, as Mubarak’s attitude towards the Muslim Brotherhood shifted from viewing it as a potential ally to a potential threat, but its members continued to be able contest elections as independents.
The 2000 Egyptian legislative election
In 2000, Egypt prepared to hold its fifth election to the People’s Assembly since Mubarak assumed the presidency. The election took place against the backdrop of a mobilised constitutional reform movement. In 1999, a group calling itself the Political and Constitutional Reform Committee brought together members of the Muslim Brotherhood, Nasserists, communists, liberals and economic conservatives to demand free elections, direct presidential elections and an end to restrictions on the media and political organisation. The regime thoroughly rejected those demands, arguing against any moves that would “divide” the country.
The election was characterised by significantly greater judicial oversight than past elections. That followed a ruling by Egypt’s Supreme Constitutional Court in July 2000 that polling stations and ballot counts must be monitored by judges. The ruling originated from a court case brought by an independent candidate in the 1990 legislative election who argued that oversight by civil servants instead of judges—who tended to operate with greater independence from the government—violated Sadat’s 1971 constitution. The Supreme Constitutional Court’s decision was a rare victory for Egypt’s liberal civil society, which had frequently attempted to utilise provisions in Sadat’s constitution to secure legal protections via litigation. Nevertheless, the regime immediately began to explore ways of circumventing the ruling, as we will see.
To comply with the court ruling and ensure capacity for judicial oversight over the country’s 15,502 polling stations, the election was broken into three stages. The first 150 seats were elected on 18 October in northern Egypt; the next 134 seats were elected in eastern and southern Egypt on 28 October; and the final 156 seats in central Egypt and Cairo were elected on 8 November. The staged system of voting had the unintended effect of allowing the opposition to try out tactics and test messages in the first stage that could be utilised to better effect in later stages, providing something of a training ground for opposition candidates.
Since 1990, the People’s Assembly had been elected using a plurality district system rather than proportional representation, which had been ruled unconstitutional in another judicial intervention. That decision had the perhaps surprising outcome of strengthening prospects for opposition candidates by making independent candidacies more viable, thereby opening the door for coordinated campaigns by members of the Muslim Brotherhood.
The NDP was led into the election by Egypt’s new Prime Minister, Atef Ebeid, who had been appointed to office by Mubarak the previous year. A former professor of business at Cairo University, Ebeid had served in several ministerial roles from the 1980s. The NDP’s candidates were chosen in a tightly controlled process by the party’s general secretariat, although several unsuccessful candidates nonetheless chose to run as allied independents—more on them shortly.
Earlier in the year, President Mubarak’s 29-year-old son, Gamal—named after Nasser—had decided to enter politics. After years working in banking and private equity in the United States and Britain—a further indication of Egypt’s westwards orientation that had continued since the Sadat era—Gamal Mubarak was appointed to the NDP’s general secretariat and contributed to the party’s election campaign. Gamal would play a growing role within the NDP over the coming decade, raising speculation that, as in Syria, Mubarak planned to groom his son to succeed him. If that was the plan, it would ultimately be thwarted by the 2011 revolution.
Various other political parties contested the election. Among the more notable opposition parties was the New Wafd Party, the liberal, secular party described earlier, which had been contesting elections since 1984. The election was also contested by the National Progressive Unionist Rally Party, founded in 1977 as a left-wing breakaway of the Arab Socialist Union. A Nasserist party, it endorsed the principles of secularism, Marxism and Arab nationalism, and it sought to promote the ideals of Egypt’s 1952 revolution.
Another Nasserist party was—as the name suggests—the Arab Democratic Nasserist Party, which broke away from the National Democratic Party and also claimed to represent the legacy of Nasser. Finally, the election was contested by the Liberal Socialists Party. Initially founded in 1976 as a right-wing faction of the Arab Socialist Union, the Liberal Socialists—as the name very much would not suggest—ended up becoming a moderate, economically liberal Islamist party.
Multiple independent candidates also contested the election, including, as discussed earlier, some failed NDP candidates and members of the Muslim Brotherhood, who were prohibited from formally contesting as an organised movement or political party. Muslim Brotherhood independent candidates were identified on the ballot by their slogan: “Islam is the solution.” However, some Muslim Brotherhood activists were arrested by the regime during the run-up to the first round, while many of the movement’s donors—a group that included several wealthy businesspeople—were harassed and threatened.
Just 24.6 million of Egypt’s 73 million residents were eligible to vote, partly due to Egypt’s overwhelmingly young populace, with almost half its population being under the age of 20.
Results
The advent of judicial oversight ensured that there was markedly less direct fraud than in previous elections, a development that appears to have taken Mubarak by surprise. Judges prevented unregistered pro-NDP voters from casting ballots and refused to allow police officers to transport ballot boxes to election counts, removing some of the most blatant opportunities for ballot rigging. Nevertheless, the regime remained able to influence the election outside of polling stations by intimidating voters and candidates, destroying opposition campaign material and arresting opposition activists. The NDP’s structural advantages and state dominance ensured that the overall results were not a surprise.
Given the fluidity in party allegiance and the overlap between candidates who stood as NDP-aligned independents, tallies for the election results often vary between sources depending on how exactly they counted. Including independents who were explicitly affiliated with or members of the NDP, the results showed the NDP’s tally rising from 318 seats to 353, representing 78% of the People’s Assembly. Some of those nominal independent candidates were people who had been rejected as formal NDP candidates, but nonetheless acted as de facto NDP candidates and, upon election, became NDP MPs.
However, that rise on paper did not reveal the full picture. Only 38.9% of candidates explicitly contesting under the NDP banner won election, down from 52.6% in 1995. Two-thirds of incumbent MPs were defeated, including eight committee chairs. Although that was largely due to NDP candidates competing against one another in various districts, the trend suggested a growing lack of party coordination—something the NDP would seek to correct later in the decade.
Meanwhile, 72 genuine independents MPs were elected. Again, on paper, that number was down from 113 successful independents who were elected in 1995. But those independent MPs actually represented an enlarged opposition bloc, as a smaller number—just 35—went on to join the NDP after the election. Of the remaining 37 opposition independents, 17 were members of the Muslim Brotherhood, up from just one in 1995. Although not formally members of a party, the group of 17 Muslim Brotherhood independents now comprised the largest single opposition bloc in the new parliament.
With the defection of 35 independent MPs, the government’s seat tally was bolstered to 398, or 88% of seats. Only 12% of MPs truly represented opposition voices—and even they operated within limits that were tolerated by the regime. That was double the proportion of opposition MPs who had been elected in 1995, indicating that the new judicial oversight requirements had resulted in some success in facilitating competitive contests, but the opposition remained firmly locked out of power or influence.
Of the official opposition parties, only 17 of their combined 352 candidates were successfully elected to the People’s Assembly. The New Wafd Party gained one seat, rising to seven seats, as did the National Progressive Unionist Rally Party, which rose to six seats. The Arab Democratic Nasserist Party tripled is representation from one to three seats, while the Liberal Socialists Party retained their single seat. No other party won representation.
The new parliament was overwhelmingly male: 443 of its members, or 98%, were men, with just 11 women elected. Five of those women were among the ten members appointed by President Mubarak in a bid to provide token representation; two of the appointed members were also Coptic Christians, representing Egypt’s largest and main religious minority.
In a further indication of some judicial independence, two results in Alexandria were annulled due to irregularities. Nevertheless, this plainly did not alter the fundamental character of the election, which was an attempt to legitimate the ruling regime while preventing any genuine contestation for political power.
Aftermath
As usual, the opposition was denied any real influence or ability to shape policy. Instead, it used its minimal representation to help state functions and services work more effectively for their constituents and attempt some basic scrutiny of government policies. After the election, the regime upped its raids and detentions of the Muslim Brotherhood and liberal opposition figures.
Alarmed by the advent of judicial oversight, which had allowed the opposition’s presence in the People’s Assembly to double from 6% to 12%--truly, a threat to Mubarak’s rule—the regime found a loophole to avoid a repeat in municipal elections that were held in 2002, leading to an opposition boycott. Evidently, the opposition rising above 10% representation in the parliament was perceived by the regime as outgrowing its tolerated role of providing a façade of pluralism.
However, the Muslim Brotherhood was able to use the successful election of 17 of its members in 2000 as a springboard for further electoral success. It would mobilise further for the 2005 People’s Assembly election, electing 88 of its members as independent MPs—a sizable opposition bloc, despite the regime’s continued attempts to avoid genuine contests. The regime then responded by placing further barriers on independent MPs to win election and by cracking down on the Muslim Brotherhood, arresting thousands of its members, in yet another reversal in the state’s attitude towards the organisation; it would not be the last.
As in Syria, the Egyptian regime’s close control over the electoral process was unable to insulate it from popular anger and discontent. When the Arab Spring revolutionary wave swept through the region in 2011, Mubarak became the most significant autocrat to fall from power, standing down as part of an army-led transition process. That enabled Egypt to avoid following Syria, Libya and Yemen into civil war.
The Muslim Brotherhood’s popular support—demonstrated by its inroads in the 2000 election—enabled it to briefly gain power in free elections that were held in 2011 and 2012, though that would not last; Mubarak’s successor as president, the Muslim Brotherhood’s Mohamed Morsi, was overthrown in a coup after just a year in power, and Egypt returned to a secular dictatorship under the rule of Abdel Fattah El-Sisi, which remains in power to this day. The Muslim Brotherhood was once again banned, and has not been permitted to play a role in any of the subsequent post-revolutionary elections, which have, once again, been tightly controlled.
As I mentioned earlier, Egypt was often a case study for post-Cold War discussions of democratisation and autocracy. The country was viewed by some commentators and analysts as following the trajectory of economic liberalisation leading inevitably to political liberalisation, an idea that was much more in vogue in the immediate post-Cold War period than it is today. With the benefit of hindsight—although, really, it was fairly obvious at the time—the Mubarak regime was relatively entrenched, and certainly had no intention of relinquishing power or allowing genuine electoral contestation.
Yet, nor was Egypt a static dictatorship. The country did experience periods of limited liberalisation under Mubarak, as the regime relaxed, sought to co-opt parts of the opposition or was thwarted by elements of the judiciary and opposition. Instead of a liberalising country or an unchanging dictatorship, Egyptian politics swung like a pendulum between periods of limited openness and harsh crackdowns, depending on the incentives and vulnerabilities of the ruling elite at the given moment. The 2000 legislative election came at the end of one such period of renewed oppression and, through an assertion of judicial independence, marked a new period of slightly enhanced opportunity for the Egyptian opposition.
And what of Atef Ebeid, the Prime Minister who led the NDP into the 2000 election? He served as Prime Minister for five years, briefly acting as president for two weeks in 2004 while Mubarak received medical treatment in Germany. He was replaced as Prime Minister shortly afterwards—I assume not because of anything he did in those two weeks—and he went on to lead the Arab International Bank. However, he could not escape the drive for accountability that accompanied the 2011 revolution: he was removed from office after Mubarak’s overthrow over corruption allegations and, in 2012, was sentenced to ten years in prison. He died in 2014 at the age of 82.
Bibliography
Al-Awadi, Hesham, In Pursuit of Legitimacy: The Muslim Brothers and Mubarak, 1982-2000 (I.B. Taurus: London, 2004).
Brownlee, Jason, “Democratisation in the Arab World? The Decline of Pluralism in Mubarak’s Egypt,” Journal of Democracy 13.4 (October 2002), pp. 6-14.
Cleveland, William L. & Bunton, Martin, A History of the Modern Middle East (Westview Press, 2013).
Kienle, Eberhard, A Grand Delusion: Democracy and Economic Reform in Egypt (I.B. Taurus: London, 2001).
Petty, Glenn E., “The Arab Democracy Deficit: The Case of Egypt,” Arab Studies Quarterly 26.2 (Spring 2004), pp. 91-107.
Sowers, Jeannie & Toensing, Chris (eds), The Journey to Tahrir: Revolution, Protest and Social Change in Egypt (Verso: London, 2012).


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Transcript:
Hello and welcome to episode 5 of the History of Elections podcast, where we will travel back in time to 1940, when a generally less well known referendum was held in the colony of French Polynesia to decide its loyalty during the Second World War.
August, 1940. The Second World War raged. Italy conquered British Somalia; Britain endured what came to be known as the “hardest day” in the four-month aerial Battle of Britain, in which both sides lost around 60 fighter planes over the course of a single day; the British Royal Air Force in turn conducted the first air raid of Berlin during the war—it would not be the last; and two British Royal Navy destroyers were sunk in a minefield off the Dutch coast, causing the loss of 300 lives. Elsewhere, Lithuania, Latvia and Estonia were formally annexed into the Soviet Union, seven weeks after being invaded; the Second Vienna Award saw Romania forced by Germany and Italy to cede parts of Transylvania to Hungary; British film stars Laurence Olivier and Vivien Leigh were married in California; and, in French Polynesia, French citizens prepared to vote on whether to give their support to the Free French Forces led by Charles de Gaulle.
The islands that comprise French Polynesia—121 in total, most notably the 14 Society Islands of Tahiti, Mo’orea, Raiatea, Bora Bora and Huahine—have been inhabited for 1,000 to 2,000 years. The islands were first settled by the Polynesian people during their migrations across the Pacific Ocean, and European explorers first made contact with the islanders in the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries. At this point, the islands were governed in a decentralised and varied system of chieftains with monarchical and theocratic traditions. In Tahiti, the power of a class of priests appears to have grown over the chieftains throughout the pre-colonial period, and there is evidence of conflict between adherents of different Gods.
Spanish, British and French missionaries subsequently spread across the Pacific in the eighteenth century with significant success. At the end of the century, a new state, the Kingdom of Tahiti, unified the island of Tahiti as a Christianised state. Later in the eighteenth century, it developed into a constitutional monarchy based on western liberal constitutions, further indicating the success of the missionaries in achieving European cultural infiltration. Tahiti had a parliament comprised of chiefs, other hereditary members and the elected representatives of landowners. As an aside, I would love to one day do a podcast episode on the elections that were held for this parliament, although sources do not seem easy to come by.
The islands were forcibly brought under French imperial control throughout the nineteenth century as part of France’s post-Napoleonic empire building. Denise Fisher has summarised the French motivation as “national prestige, a quest for scientific knowledge, and religious proselytization.” Led by Queen Pomaré IV, who ruled for 50 years, the Kingdom of Tahiti fought a war with France in the 1840s as French imperial influence expanded. Although France suffered some defeats, it ultimately emerged victorious, and Tahiti became a French protectorate in 1842. Later, in the 1880s and 1890s, France also fought a ten-year conflict known as the Leewards war across multiple other islands.
France’s imperial expansion took place alongside British, German and American expansion elsewhere in the Pacific. During the first half of the nineteenth century, France and Britain particularly competed for influence and control across the Pacific, including in Polynesia. Notably, France was the earliest of the imperial powers to formally claim territory in the Pacific, if we exclude Australia and New Zealand: the formal establishment of a protectorate in Tahiti and the Marquesas in 1842 predated Britain’s colonial rule of Fiji in 1874, Germany’s rule over New Guinea in 1885 and American rule over Hawaii in 1898.
Tahiti was formally annexed in 1881 and, by the beginning of the twentieth century, the islands of French Polynesia were brought together as one administrative unit, legally known as the French Establishments in Oceania, also translated as the French Pacific Establishments. This period brought an increase in French settlement in the islands. The islands were administered by a colonial governor with an advisory council elected by the minority of French citizens on the islands. Of the council’s 18 members, 10 were elected from Tahiti and Mo’orea, two from Marquesas, four from Tuamotus, one from Gambiers and one from the Australs and Rapa.
The governors were generally recruited from either the French colonial administrative elite or the French naval command. For example, Léonce Jore, the governor of French Polynesia between 1930 and 1932, also served periods as the governor of Niger, Senegal and New Caledonia. I.C. Campbell described the administrative setup of French Polynesia at this time as, essentially, a “dictatorial regime” that provided only basic state functions and which had a difficult relationship with the French minority population, who regularly sought more political rights—an important point to keep in mind as we come to the 1940 referendum.
The indigenous Polynesian majority population, most of whom were not French citizens, had even fewer rights. The prevailing colonial ideology remained one of European supremacy, whereby Europeans justified their rule as paternalistic and in the interests of the Polynesian people. The French settler population, even though they themselves felt they lacked appropriate political rights under the colonial system, formed a social and cultural elite in the islands.
French Polynesia’s population rose above 40,000 in the 1930s, a large majority of which was ethnically and culturally Polynesian. It should be noted that this was likely still far below the islands’ pre-colonial population, as the indigenous Polynesian population had suffered greatly from diseases brought by Europeans such as tuberculosis and smallpox. Residents of European descent, largely French in background, comprised fewer than one in five people in the islands, although I haven’t been able to find precise statistics for this period.
There was also a substantial mixed-race population known locally as “demis”, the product of over a century of intermarriage between European settlers and native Polynesians. The European and mixed-race population formed a social elite who gained an increasing share of land ownership throughout the colonial period.
Like much of France’s colonial empire, French Polynesia was thrown into turmoil during the Second World War. The fall of France to Nazi Germany in June 1940 nine months into the war resulted in the establishment of a collaborationist rump state in the south of the country. This state was titled the French State, although it is popularly known as Vichy France after the city it was administered from, and it was led as a dictatorship under its collaborationist leader, Marshal Philippe Pétain. The north fell under direct German occupation.
Under the terms of the armistice, the Vichy state was permitted to retain French overseas colonies, although the size of the colonial army was to be reduced. It had also been permitted to retain the French Navy, but the British Royal Navy succeeded in seizing and destroying numerous warships to prevent them from falling into German hands. This restricted the Vichy state’s ability to project power and control across the colonial empire.
France’s capitulation to Nazi Germany was not universally accepted. Charles de Gaulle, a French general who was in London at the time of the French surrender, issued his famous appeal of 18 June 1940 calling on French servicemen to continue the fight against Germany. The appeal centred on the role of France’s overseas empire; de Gaulle said, “France is not alone! She has a great empire behind her! Together with the British Empire, she can form a bloc that controls the seas and continues the struggle.”
De Gaulle subsequently formed a government in exile, based in London but seeking support across the empire, and he established the Free French forces. Support gathered slowly, in part due to the chaotic situation, in part due to a belief that the Allied cause was now doomed—an invasion of Britain seemed only a matter of time—and in part due to the continuation of a French state that meant joining the Free French Forces might be considered an act of rebellion. However, by 1942, the Free French Forces reported having up to 62,000 combatants, 20,000 of whom came from the colonies.
The colonies did not response immediately, many governors choosing to wait and see how events unfolded. However, some soon began to make a choice in the decision that had been forced on them. The first overseas colony to join the Free French Forces was French India. Comprised of a series of small enclaves, the colony announced its decision on 27 June. It had faced the risk of an occupation by British forces in India if it had aligned to Vichy France, so this was perhaps not a surprising decision.
Then, on 20 July, one month after de Gaulle’s speech, the New Hebrides—ruled jointly as a condominium with Britain—joined the Free French Forces. New Caledonia also joined the Free French after a brief internal power struggle featuring street protests, competing governors and an assassination attempt on the pro-Vichy governor. The French concession of Guangzhouwan in China also came under Free French control. Vichy France was ultimately unable to project its power at such a distance, despite some ongoing naval presence in the region, and the Australian navy helped the Free French faction assert control.
Perhaps more substantially, most of French Equatorial Africa—made up of the modern states of Chad, the Central African Republic, the Republic of Congo and Gabon—joined in August, after its pro-Vichy governor was reassigned to Senegal.
Not all overseas colonies flocked to the Free French cause, however. Vichy France was able to maintain control over the much closer colonies of French West Africa and Madagascar for another two years, until joint British and American invasions seized the territories. French Indochina also remained under Vichy control, in large part due to regional Japanese influence; Japanese soldiers formally entered the territory in September. In the Pacific, the French colony of Wallis and Futuna also remained under nominal Vichy control, finding itself economically isolated for 17 months until being occupied by French and American troops in 1942.
The summer of 1940 was thus a period of contestation across the French empire, as individual colonies chose whether to regard the Vichy regime as the legitimate French state or to affiliate with the Free French Forces. This was a contestation in which colonies further from the imperial core had greater freedom to decide their own loyalties. Located on almost the exact opposite side of the world from France, French Polynesia thereby had considerable scope to make a decision.
The colonial governor at the time was a man called Frédéric Chastenet de Géry. Having risen up through the ranks of the French Navy, de Géry was appointed the governor of French Polynesia in 1937. As with other colonial governors, he initially refused to make a clear decision between Vichy France and the Free French. This was in part due to the confused situation and poor communications with the outside world; the British consulate in Tahiti reportedly possessed a more reliable radio transmitter than the actual French administration, and there were concerns about German interference with French naval codes. De Géry genuinely seems to have had limited information about events that were unfolding in Europe.
Pressured by some naval officers based in Tahiti, de Géry made a proclamation on 24 June pledging to continue the fight against Germany, six days after de Gaulle’s speech. The Allies had also threatened to cut French Polynesia off from crucial trade and supplies, as had also been inflicted on Wallis and Futuna. Yet, de Géry began to backtrack on his stance. Indeed, his instinctive sympathies appear to have been in favour of Pétain and the Vichy regime; according to the British consul, de Géry described de Gaulle as “an upstart and a traitor to his country.”
In July, de Géry followed orders from Vichy to close the British consulate, and generally appeared to be aligning the colony with the Vichy regime. Colin Newbury’s impressively detailed 1971 account portrays a political situation defined largely by a power vacuum and political incompetence on the part of de Géry, as the colonial institutions struggled to cope following the collapse in authority from the French metropole.
The French settler population was itself divided. At the beginning of August, a group called the Committee of French Oceania published a proclamation urging citizens to support the Vichy regime, while also condemning Jews and Freemasons—which gives you an idea of where their political leanings lay.
Two weeks later, another group calling itself the Committee of Action for a Free France was formed seeking to respond to de Gaulle’s call for support. This latter, pro Free French committee was comprised of a number of French Polynesian elites, including multiple municipal councillors, the president of the Chamber of Agriculture, four departmental heads, the medical administrator and four chiefs. Pouvana’a a O’opa, a Polynesian veteran of the First World War and future politician—more on him later—was also a member. However, it is noteworthy that no senior military officers involved themselves at this time.
De Géry responded by implementing a Vichy law banning illegal gatherings, which had been passed in the metropole two weeks earlier. Yet, confident that they represented majority opinion among the citizenry, members of the Committee of Action met with de Géry to demand a referendum be held on the matter. He reluctantly agreed, perhaps further underscoring his confused, uncertain approach and lack of any great political conviction, or perhaps this marked a recognition of his lack of full authority in the islands.
A referendum was quickly organised and held on 1 September in the islands of Tahiti and Mo’orea, which were—and remain—the most populated islands in French Polynesia, comprising over half the territory’s population. The referendum was only open to French citizens, meaning that the overwhelming majority of indigenous Polynesians were denied a vote on the colony’s future.
5,582 citizens participated in the referendum. As I mentioned, I haven’t been able to find precise population breakdowns for the period, but such turnout probably comprised a clear majority of French citizens living in the islands. The result was unequivocal: 5,564 voters, or 99.7% of those who cast a ballot, voted in favour of affiliation with the Free French Forces. Just 18 voters, or 0.3%, voted against the initiative. Although most pro-Vichy citizens presumably boycotted the vote, the results undoubtedly represented a clear majority of French citizens in the two islands.
A power struggle immediately ensued. A provisional council was declared by senior members of the French settler community, the authority of which was tacitly recognised by the civilian administration. However, the naval commandant refused to recognise its authority, and the naval armoury was seized by Free French supporters to ensure it remained under their control. However, the commander of the colonial infantry and internal police force, Félix Broche, did give his support to the provisional council, ensuring that the balance of military power in the islands—such that it was—fell in line with the new authorities. The new administration also made use of local newspapers in the colony to communicate its stance and introduce de Gaulle and the Free French cause to the general populace.
Without any means to assert his position, de Géry was forced to resign as governor the following week. He and a handful of pro-Vichy naval officers promptly left the colony to return to metropolitan France via Indochina—I am not quite sure of the transport logistics involved in that journey—having effectively been overthrown in a peaceful revolution.
The provisional council’s programme included repealing all instructions from the Vichy Government, breaking ties with Vichy, resuming diplomatic and economic relationships with Britain, New Zealand and Australia, continuing the war against Germany and, in the words of one British press account, keeping “a close watch on Germans and persons likely to foment disorders.” The islands’ military intendant, Edmond Mansard, was appointed the colony’s governor, who confirmed the affiliation to the Free French Forces.
Afterwards, French Polynesia would not play any direct role in the Second World War. Although the colony was a planned target of Japanese conquest following its declaration of war against the Allies in December 1941, Japanese forces were unable to advance that far across the Pacific. French Polynesia thereby avoided being the site of direct combat between Japan and the Allies during the four-year Pacific War. Nevertheless, thousands of islanders enlisted in the Free French Forces, many of whom fought in campaigns in North Africa and Italy, and 94 lost their lives. A limited American military and economic presence developed in the islands during the war, providing a small economic boom. There was also another political crisis in 1941, which saw two successive governors arrested or forced out of office—over financial and resourcing issues rather than questions of loyalty—but the political situation remained stable thereafter.
Some Polynesians used the political disruption during the war as an opportunity to push for greater autonomy. For example, in Tahiti, Pouvana’a a O’opa, who we last met as a member of the local Free French committee in 1940, led a campaign for autonomy and independence. Although he did not succeed, he went on to play a major role in the postwar politics of French Polynesia, founding what I believe to have been the first Polynesian political party, the Democratic Rally of the Tahitian People, and later representing the islands in both the French National Assembly and the French Senate.
Although French Polynesia never gained independence, there was a liberalisation of French policy towards after the war. The territory gained its own elected assembly and, later, formal autonomy; citizenship was extended to all indigenous Polynesians; and French Polynesia gained representation in the French parliament. Some historians have credited these decisions, made in the immediate aftermath of the war, to the territory’s decision to align itself with De Gaulle and the Free French Forces—though the move to autonomy and greater political rights for Polynesians would presumably have been the direction of travel in any case.
The 1940 referendum in French Polynesia was an interesting if relatively small part of the crisis that hit the French empire in 1940, as individual colonies and territories found themselves forced to choose between pledging their loyalty to Pétain’s Vichy regime or de Gaulle’s government in exile. French Polynesia was one of the few—or perhaps only—territory to make this decision by a direct vote, although the referendum was largely a mechanism to enforce the decision upon an indecisive but Vichy-leaning governor. The events of 1940 were essentially a revolution by and within the French colonial elite. The referendum excluded the indigenous Polynesian majority population, although some Polynesians participated in the mobilisations that took place that summer.
The process shone a spotlight on the colonial system that had governed French Polynesia for 60 years, revealing it to perhaps be more brittle than many had expected. It did not presage or contribute to any collapse in French authority, unlike many other colonies after the Second World War, but I think these events contributed to a recognition—here, as elsewhere—that the colonial status quo was no longer tenable.
And what of Frédéric Chastenet de Géry, the governor who was overthrown in 1940? After—somehow—returning to France, he continued to serve the Vichy regime, becoming chief of staff of the State Secretariat of the Colonies. After the war, he was stripped of his official decorations as punishment for his collaboration, although these were reinstated just a few years later. Later in life, he wrote a memoir providing his account of his time as the governor of French Polynesia, titled The Last Days of the Third Republic in Tahiti: Memoirs of a Governor. He lived to the age of 87, dying in 1976.
Further Reading
“Pacific Islands”, Encyclopedia Britannica, accessed on 3 November 2025 at https://www.britannica.com/place/Pacific-Islands.
Campbell, I.S., A History of the Pacific Islands (Berkeley, University of California Press: 1989).
Fisher, Denise, France in the South Pacific: Power and Politics (ANU E Press, Canberra: 2013).
Gille, Bernard, “Parliamentary Life in Tahiti 1824 – 1903,” Victoria University of Wellington Law Review 23.4 (Nov 1993), pp. 81-123.
Newbury, Colin, Tahiti Nui: Change and Survival in French Polynesia, 1767-1945 (University of Hawai’i Press, Honolulu: 1971).
Rallu, Jean-Louis, “Patterns of population decline following European contact and colonization: the cases of Tahiti and the Marquesas,” Population and Economics 6.2 (2 August 2022), pp. 88-107.


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The 2020 Syrian legislative election was a controlled exercise by the dictatorship of Bashar al-Assad, which had governed Syria for 60 years. However, it provided an insight into the state of the regime and the country after nine years of civil war.
Transcript:
Hello and welcome to another episode of the History of Elections podcast, delayed somewhat by exciting life events: I got married!
This week, to steal a joke from one of former my university lecturers, we will step into the Ba’ath and return close to the present day by exploring the 2020 parliamentary election in Syria. The second last legislative election to be held in Syria under the 55-year rule of the Assad family, this election provided a façade of stability for a regime that, as would soon become clear, was continuing to crumble.
July, 2020. Most of the world lived under public health restrictions imposed in response to the Covid-19 pandemic, which in this month reached 15 million confirmed cases; a constitutional amendment was passed in Russia that would allow President Vladimir Putin to run for two further six-year terms; Turkish President Recep Tayyip Erdoğan ordered the Hagia Sophia to be reverted from a museum to be a mosque; former Malaysian Prime Minister Najib Razak was found guilty of abuse of power and corruption and sentenced to 12 years in prison; NASA launched the Mars 2020 mission containing the Perseverance rover and Ingenuity helicopter, which would land on the red planet seven months later; elections were held in Croatia, Poland and Singapore; and, in Syria, some voters prepared to go to the polls to cast ballots that theoretically determined their next parliament.
Background: Ba’athism
Syria had been governed by the Arab Socialist Ba’ath Party since 1963, when it came to power in a bloodless coup that overthrew the partially democratic but unstable system of civilian rule that had emerged, with several interruptions, after independence from France in 1946. The Ba’ath Party assumed totalitarian control of the Syrian state, purging its political opponents and cracking down on civil society. In 1966, a second coup was orchestrated by a different faction in the Ba’ath Party, while a third coup in 1970 brought Defence Minister Hafez al-Assad to power as the country’s third Ba’athist ruler. Assad brought an end to the instability that had characterised Syrian politics since independence in 1946 and would rule as Syria’s president until his death 30 years later, establishing a cult of personality around himself and his family.
Ba’athism is a complex and variable political ideology. Meaning ‘renaissance’ or ‘resurrection,’ Ba’athism is a revolutionary socialist, Arab nationalist and pan-Arab ideology that emerged in the 1940s. Ba’ath parties were founded across the Arab world, with branches established in Syria, Iraq, Yemen and Jordan, and its ideas influenced many pan-Arab leaders, including Egyptian president Gamal Abdel Nasser. The movement’s slogan was “Unity, Freedom, Socialism”, and it called for a united Arab socialist state free from external imperialist control. The movement was particularly successful in Syria, achieving some success in elections held during the 1950s.
Many different variants of Ba’athism emerged in this period—the party was prone to factionalism and different interpretations became predominant in different states. The first Ba’athist Government was briefly formed in 1963 as a result of a coup in Iraq—a development that inspired the Ba’athist coup plotters in Syria, who orchestrated their coup a month later.
The 1966 coup in Syria brought to power a faction known as the neo-Ba’athists, a group that focused more overtly on Marxist ideas and pursued stronger relations with the Soviet Union. The neo-Ba’athists had also become disillusioned with pan-Arabism, as embodied by Nasser, and even forced some of the original founding thinkers of the Ba’athist movement into exile. Indeed, Salah al-Din al-Bitar, one of the first Ba’athist leaders of Syria, later said that “I no longer recognise my party”. This, among other things, led to tensions with Iraq, where a more enduring Ba’athist government was established in 1968, which has been described as a more right-wing from of Ba’athism. However, in practice, Assad proved to be more pragmatic than his predecessors, for example by allowing a greater degree of private enterprise from the 1970s onwards.
The Ba’athist regime represented a very different social background than Syria’s past Governments, particularly under Assad. Its leading political and military figures, including Assad himself, were from rural and peasant backgrounds, while the former urban elite, including the Ba’ath Party’s founders, was sidelined. Alawites, an ethnoreligious offshoot of Shia Islam concentrated in the coastal north-west of Syria who comprised 10% of the country’s population and who had historically been sidelined from positions of power, were also prominent within the regime, often at the expense of other social groups.
The neo-Ba’athists emphasised a central role for the armed forces and ruled Syria as a military dictatorship. Indeed, by the 1980s, Syria spent over 20% of its GDP on the military, justified by the aim of countering Israel’s military strength—by this point, Syria had fought and lost three wars against Israel, and part of the country—the Golan Heights—was under Israeli occupation. The Ba’athist movement was also fervently secular. The first Ba’athist Governments viewed Islam as a reactionary force that was contradictory to socialist revolution. This stance was toned down by Assad from the 1970s who, although maintaining the general secular ideological stance of the movement, sought to co-opt clerics and religious figures to weaken the emerging Islamist opposition movement.
The consolidating Assad regime was opposed by the Muslim Brotherhood, an Islamist movement that grew increasingly militant throughout the 1970s. Its opposition particularly developed in response to Assad’s decisions to intervene against the Palestinian Liberation Organisation in Lebanon’s civil war and to back Iran against fellow Ba’athist Saddam Hussein’s invasion in 1980. The Islamist opposition was also against the regime’s secularist and Alawite character and it gained particular support in urban areas, notably Aleppo, Homs and Hama. A guerilla war emerged in the late 1970 and senior Government and Ba’ath officials, particularly Alawites, were targeted in attacks and assassination attempts.
Foreshadowing events 40 years later, the regime responded by implementing sieges against opposition-controlled areas. The uprising culminated in 1982 when the Muslim Brotherhood seized control of large parts of Hama. The regime responded with a brutal crackdown by indiscriminately bombarding rebel-held areas with artillery and tank fire, which is estimated to have killed between 10,000 and 40,000 people and left much of the city in ruins.
Shortly afterwards, Assad also, thanks to key support within the military, survived a coup attempt by his younger brother, Rifaat al Assad, who had led the military campaign in Hama. These events further underscored the instability of the regime and the fact that Assad’s power rested solely on the loyalty of the army, rather than stemming from popular support or institutional legitimacy.
Political System
The Ba’ath regime initially governed under a state of emergency with a provisional constitution that replaced Syria’s 1930 constitution. Assad maintained the state of emergency throughout his rule but a new permanent constitution was adopted in 1973. The constitution declared the Arab Socialist Ba’ath Party as the “leading party in the society and the state”. Syria was not strictly a one-party state, as allied satellite parties within the National Progressive Front coalition, which Assad set up in 1972, were permitted to continue operating in subordination to the Ba’ath Party.
In line with its socialist orientation, the National Progressive Front coalition operated under the popular front or national front model that was prevalent in Eastern European socialist states during the Cold War and is used to this day in China and North Korea. In this model, a dominant party—the Ba’ath Party, in Syria’s case—leads a group of satellite parties with some degree of ideological variation. These parties would represent different interest groups and provide the regime with a broader social base, creating the illusion of political pluralism and co-opting additional political constituencies into the regime.
The Ba’athist state in Syria was a presidential system. However, it maintained a Parliament called the People’s Assembly that was elected in conditions that were designed to ensure the Ba’ath Party’s supremacy. The Parliament in turn nominated a candidate for President, who was to be confirmed in a national referendum. Assad “won” five such votes during his rule, the official figures never showing him falling below 99.2% support.
The question of why authoritarian states, particularly in the twentieth century, felt the need to hold such obviously rigged elections is an interesting one, and I may dedicate a full episode to it at some point. As in other such systems, elections and referenda provided the theoretical base of legitimacy for the Ba’ath Party’s rule—this was not, ideologically speaking, a monarchy, as much as it may have acted like one. Elections also served other purposes, including demonstrating the regime’s political power, demoralising the opposition, gathering political information and, sometimes, providing a very controlled opportunity for areas of discontent to be identified so that the regime could act in response.
Assad ruled Syra through military strength, a sophisticated intelligence apparatus, violent crackdowns on political opponents, an expansive system of military prisons and death camps, a sectarian divide-and-rule strategy and rigged elections. He maintained control of Syria until his death from a heart attack in 2000, at the age of 69. He had established a dynastic plan for succession, despite some opposition from Ba’athist officials. It was widely believed that he was anointing his eldest son, Bassel, to succeed him in the presidency. However, upon Bassel’s death in a car crash in 1994, Assad’s second son, Bashar, was recalled from his ophthalmology training in London to be prepared for the succession.
Bashar al-Assad and Civil War
So, upon Hafez’s death in 2000, Bashar duly succeeded him as the President of Syria. The parliament rushed through a constitutional amendment to reduce the minimum age for the presidency from 40 to 34—which was, coincidentally, Bashar al Assad’s age at that time. Bashar proceeded to “win” a snap referendum—in which he was again the only candidate—with 99.7% of the vote.
Bashar al-Assad initially relinquished some of the most repressive aspects of his father’s rule. He portrayed himself as a reformer and a short period known as the “Damascus Spring” saw a degree of toleration of demands for political reform, chiefly the cancellation of the state of emergency, the release of political prisoners and the right to join opposition parties. The regime even partially met some of these demands, releasing hundreds of political prisoners months after Bashar’s succession. However, the regime ultimately decided to crush the emerging reform movement, arresting many of the leading pro-reform organisers. Thus, after a brief interlude, Bashar returned Syria to the kind of repressive rule that had been orchestrated by his father for 30 years.
His rule would not prove to be a period of stability for Syria. In 2011, the Arab Spring revolutionary wave toppled authoritarian governments in Tunisia, Egypt and Yemen. Syria—now the only Ba’athist state following the US-led invasion of Iraq in 2003—was also hit by mass protests that similarly called for greater political rights and an end to the concentration of power and wealth among a small elite.
In Syria, the protests were sparked by the regime’s response to teenagers from the southern city of Daraa writing anti-regime graffiti on a wall, which included the slogan of the Arab Spring protests in other countries, “The people want the fall of the regime,” and also, “It’s your turn, doctor.” The teenagers were detained and tortured by the secret police, triggering protests across the country.
The Assad regime responded with a combination of repression and token reforms. On one hand, the state of emergency was brought to an end after 48 years, while a new constitution was later introduced that theoretically ended the Ba’ath Party’s monopoly on power. This allowed opposition candidates to contest presidential and parliamentary elections. However, in practice, the Ba’ath Party remained utterly dominant.
Meanwhile, the protests were put down with growing levels of violence. Thousands of protesters were gunned down in the streets, arrested, tortured and executed in prisons that effectively operated as death and torture camps for dissidents; more details about atrocities carried out in these prisons, including the infamous Sednaya prison in the north of Damascus, became known upon their liberation in December 2024.
Rather than suppress the opposition movement, the Assad regime’s brutality provoked an armed uprising and mass defections from the military, triggering the Syrian Civil War. This is not the podcast to dive into the details of a war that became incredibly complex and multilayered. From an electoral standpoint, the regime continued to hold parliamentary and presidential elections as vast swathes of the country fell out of its control, despite increasingly brutal military tactics, including the use of barrel bombs and chemical weapons on opposition-controlled urban areas.
Assad’s forces reached a nadir in 2015 during the height of the jihadist Islamic State group, also known as ISIS, at which point the regime only controlled about a quarter of Syria’s territory. Indeed, at times, Assad tacitly supported ISIS by releasing jihadists from prisons and focusing his offensives against more moderate rebel groups in order to promote the narrative that the only alternative to his regime was rule by terrorist groups like ISIS. External support and interventions from Iran, Russia and the Lebanese armed group Hezbollah, as well as the international coalition against the Islamic State, allowed Assad to regain ground.
By 2020, the regime had regained about two-thirds of Syrian territory. The only areas still outwith Assad’s control were Rojava in the northeast, controlled by the Kurdish-led Syrian Democratic Forces; territory in the north controlled by the Turkish-backed Syrian National Army; territory controlled by the Free Syrian Army in the south near the American Al-Tanf base along the Jordanian border; and the Syrian Salvation Government centred in Idlib, led by the Islamist Hay’at Tahrir al Sham organisation, with which the Assad Government had reached a ceasefire agreement in 2020. As it went on, the war increasingly became an alphabet soup of militias and organisations—I’ve attached a map of the military situation in 2020 in the show notes. As noted earlier, the regime also did not control the Golan Heights, which remained under Israeli occupation and annexation.
By 2020, Bashar al-Assad and the Ba’athist state appeared to have survived the nine-year civil war. Syria was effectively partitioned, but the regime had majority control of the country and governed the vast majority of its remaining people; the country’s population had fallen from 23 million in 2011 to 19 million in 2017, with millions internally displaced. This victory was, as would soon become clear, a mirage. After over a decade of war, international isolation, corruption and mismanagement, in addition to the impact of the Covid-19 pandemic, the economy of regime-held areas weakened to such a degree that, when a renewed rebel offensive was launched from Idlib in 2024, the regime crumbled in the space of a week, bringing a sudden and unexpected end to 61 years of Ba’athist rule.
However, the legislative elections held in 2020 appeared to confirm Assad’s victory. Whereas the previous election in 2016 had been held throughout multiple conflict zones and could not be held at all in much of the country, the 2020 election was conducted in over 70 per cent of the country’s territory. The election was also held a year ahead of the upcoming presidential election in 2021, providing an opportunity for the regime to develop its electoral infrastructure. Assad had been “elected” to a seven-year term in 2014 with just 92.2% of the vote—a very low figure by his family’s standards—after alternative candidates were allowed to run for the first time.
The 2020 Legislative Election
250 seats of the People’s Council were up for election in 2020. The election was conducted by party bloc voting in 15 multi-member constituencies. The National Progressive Front electoral list contained 10 parties, though most candidates were from the Ba’ath Party. Candidates outwith the National Progressive Front were also permitted to stand but, by exerting indirect control over candidate selections, the regime ensured that no candidates who were genuinely critical of the Government were able to contest. Unlike the 2012 parliamentary election, when a small opposition list was allowed to participate as part of the regime’s token reforms, no other organised lists contested in 2020.
1,656 candidates ultimately ran for 250 seats in the People’s Council. This was a marked drop from the 2,649 candidates in 2016, partly due to the end of Government subsidies and economic privileges for new MPs, a decision driven by the country’s economic situation.
Due to the ongoing Covid-19 pandemic, the election was postponed from its original scheduled date of 13 April to 20 May, and then again to 19 July. On the election day itself, voters had to wear masks and observe social distancing while queuing to vote, and would only be let into polling stations after having their temperatures checked. Voting was largely able to proceed without conflict, although a bomb was detonated in a polling station near Daraa in the south of the country.
The official turnout figure for election day was 33.2%, a sharp drop from the figure of 58% recorded in 2016, which the Government attributed to the Covid-19 pandemic. According to official figures, just over 6 million of Syria’s 18.8 million registered voters cast ballots at over 7,000 polling stations across regime-held parts of the country. Many employers were encouraged to compel their employees to vote in order to boost the turnout. Even these figures may have been massaged upwards, with allegations of ballot stuffing; indeed, at least five polling stations had to conduct recounts after more ballots were cast than there were registered voters. Some estimates put the actual turnout as low as 10%.
At some polling stations, portraits of Assad hung from the walls. In areas recently recaptured from opposition forces, for example the Damascus suburb of Douma—which had been subject to a chemical weapon attack by Assad’s forces two years earlier—polling stations were positioned near rubble and buildings pockmarked with bullets.
The National Progressive Front saw its seat tally fall from 200 to 183, while the number of unaffiliated members rose from 50 to 67—although, as noted earlier, none of these members were genuine opposition figures. Even with this drop, the National Progressive Front maintained a supermajority in the People’s Council, with just under 75% of seats, and the Ba’ath Party alone was, by remarkable coincidence, one seat over the threshold for a two-thirds supermajority. These numbers did not ultimately affect the Ba’ath Party’s degree of control over the country, and they certainly were not an indication of its political support.
Party Results
However, because we like numbers here, let’s dive into the results anyway, with the caveat that this was almost entirely a planned outcome rather than genuine fluctuation in electoral support. The Arab Socialist Ba’ath Party dropped slightly from 172 seats to 167—not a significant decline, as the party had recorded lower numbers during earlier parts of Bashar al-Assad’s presidency. So-called independents provided another 67 MPs, up from 62. These independents included a number of businessmen and wealthy warlords, who Assad hoped would help alleviate some of his economic challenges.
The second largest party in the previous parliament, the Syrian Social Nationalist Party, or the SSNP, lost more than half of its seats, falling from seven to three, due to a reduction in its number of candidates on the National Progressive Front list. A nationalist and irridentist party sometimes described as fascist, the SSNP supported an expansive Syrian state across the Levant, appealing to Syrians who viewed the territories now internationally recognised as Israel, Palestine, Lebanon and Jordan as part of historical southern Syria. The party therefore did not pursue pan-Arabism. It also contests elections in Lebanon.
The SSNP has had a complex relationship with the Ba’ath Party. The Ba’ath Governments and Assad regime maintained the pre-coup ban on the SSNP upon coming to power . However, the parties came closer due to shared interests during the Lebanese Civil War, and the SSNP was officially unbanned in 2005. It then contested the 2007 election as part of the National Progressive Front and, when the Syrian Civil War broke out in 2011, it provided firm political and military support to Assad.
When an “opposition” list was formed for the 2012 parliamentary election, the SSNP broke from the National Progressive Front and joined the new list. It rejoined the National Progressive Front in 2014 and contested subsequent elections as part of the ruling coalition. However, ahead of the 2020 election, the regime appeared to crack down on the SSNP in an attempt to curtail the influence that it had gained during the civil war, particularly among Syria’s minorities, due to the reduced credibility of Ba’athism. The SSNP’s militia, the Eagles of the Whirlwind, which had supported the Syrian army during the war, was dismantled in 2019, though it remained active in Lebanon, and the party itself was sidelined during the 2020 election. This explains the SSNP’s reduced influence and loss of seats.
Syria’s two communist factions—the Communist Party (Unified) and Communist Party (Bakdash), named after its leaders in the Bakdash family—won 4 seats between them, unchanged from 2016. The party had split back in 1986 over differences relating to political developments in the Soviet Union, but each faction remained part of the National Progressive Front and broadly endorsed traditional Marxist-Leninist ideology.
The Socialist Unionist Party’s tally was also unchanged at two seats. The Socialist Unionist Party had split from the Ba’ath Party in 1961 and, perhaps unsurprisingly, also endorsed an Arab nationalist and socialist platform. Meanwhile, the Arab Socialist Union Party, another Arab nationalist and socialist party—you can see the ideological similarities in the names—gained an additional seat to finish with three seats. The National Covenant Party, another Arab nationalist party, also gained a seat to finish with two.
The Arab Democratic Union Party—not to be confused with the Arab Socialist Union Party—re-entered the People’s Assembly for the first time since 2012. The Arab Democratic Union Party supported—you guessed it—an Arab nationalist and socialist platform. Finally, the Democratic Socialist Unionist Party, a party that had split from the Socialist Unionist Party in 1974, also re-entered the People’s Assembly for the first time since 2012.
As that survey of Syria’s parties illustrated, the National Progressive Front did not contain a great deal of ideological diversity. The only exceptions to the Arab nationalist and socialist parties was provided by the SSNP—and its influence was being diminished—and the two communist factions. The coalition was, then, an exercise in controlled pluralism, expanding the regime’s tent beyond the Ba’ath Party, but not very far beyond it.
The number of women in the People’s Assembly was also reduced, falling from 32 in 2016 to 27, or just over 10%--the lowest figure since 2003.
There were some interesting shifts in the religious and ethnic composition of the new legislature. Sunni Muslims comprised the largest number of elected members, at 68%, reflecting their majority in the country, while Alawites were the second largest group at 17%. Additionally, 18 MPs were Christians of varying denominations and 8 were Druze. The Druze members largely replaced those in the previous People’s Assembly, with the new members seen to be regime loyalists in the context of ongoing anti-Assad unrest in Suweyda in the south, Syria’s only Druze-majority governorate. There were also six Kurdish members elected, up from three in 2016, though this representation still fell well below the Kurdish share of Syria’s population.
However, the most notable change was the inclusion of four Armenian MPs, the first time any had been elected since 1947. This has been attributed to Assad’s attempts to maintain support among Syria’s Armenian minority and also with the state of Armenia itself, due to their shared hostility to Turkey and alliance with Russia. The inclusion of greater ethnic diversity also allowed the Assad regime to continue claiming a status as the protector of Syria’s minority communities.
An analysis by the Middle East Institute identified 12% of successful candidates as senior figures in pro-regime militias, while 22% were suspected of committing crimes against humanity or war crimes. Meanwhile, 16 MPs were former generals, 13 of whom were elected for the first time. This reflected a continuing militarisation of the People’s Assembly, which had begun with the 2012 election, and provided an opportunity to provide patronage to figures within the army and militias that had helped Assad remain in power.
Aftermath
As this was not a consequential election that had the capacity to shift the balance of power in Syria, there is little to say about its aftermath. In August, President Assad dismissed the incumbent Prime Minister, Imad Khamis, and replaced him with the water minister and former road engineer, Hussein Arnous, in the context of a deteriorating economic situation. The new cabinet, unsurprisingly, was dominated by Ba’ath Party members. Arnous would serve for four years until the next legislative election in 2024. His replacement in September 2024 ensured that he narrowly avoided being in office during the regime’s collapse a few months later.
Every party that won seats in the 2020 election ended up being banned by the Syrian Provisional Government in January 2025; many Ba’ath Party offices had already been seized the previous month as Assad fled the country. It is unclear whether any of them will be reformed in some shape in the new Syria—or, indeed, what kind of political system or state will emerge from the transition: the peril of covering an election so close to the present day!
Thank you very much for listening. The next episode of the History of Elections podcast will take us further back in time as we explore the 1940 wartime referendum held in French Oceania…
Reading List
Cleveland, William L. & Bunton, Martin, A History of the Modern Middle East (Routledge: New York, 2016).
‘Syria goes to the polls as new sanctions hit war-ravaged economy,’ Reuters (19 July 2020), accessed on 18 August 2025 at: https://www.reuters.com/article/world/syria-goes-to-the-polls-as-new-sanctions-hit-war-ravaged-economy-idUSKCN24K0FS.
Shaar, Karam & Akil, Samy, ‘Inside Syria’s Clapping Chamber: Dynamics of the 2020 Parliamentary Elections,’ Middle East Institute (28 January 2021).


This is a public episode. If you would like to discuss this with other subscribers or get access to bonus episodes, visit historyofelections.substack.com

In 1940, Costa Rica held elections for its president and legislature amid a transitional period in the country's history that laid the path to civil war.
Hello, and welcome to episode 3 of the History of Elections podcast. This month we will be exploring the 1940 general election in Costa Rica, held during a transformative period in the Central American country’s history that would define its political trajectory for the rest of the century.
February, 1940. The Soviet Union begins a massive attack on Finnish forces defending Karelia during the Winter War, two months after the Soviet invasion first began; in Tibet, the 4-year-old Tenzin Gyatso is proclaimed the 13th Dalai Lama, the leader of Tibetan Buddhism; the radioactive isotope carbon-14, which would from the basis of radiocarbon dating, is discovered by researchers at the University of California, Berkeley; the Soviet theatre director, Vsevolod Meyerhold, is executed as part of Joseph Stalin’s purges; and, in Costa Rica, voters go to the polls to elect their next president and parliament.
Since gaining independence from Spain in 1821, Costa Rica has developed a reputation as one of the most stable and democratic countries in Latin America. Like many of its neighbours, Costa Rica has experienced blips in that record—notably, a series of coups d’etat in the 1860s—but, by 1870, a sequence of stable if not always democratic liberal administrations governed the country for several decades. Another coup in 1917 led to a short-lived military regime that was overthrown by a popular uprising two years later, after which constitutional government was restored.
From 1910, the dominant party in Costa Rican politics was the Republican Party. Founded in 1901, it first came to power under the presidency of Ricardo Jiménez, who served three non-consecutive terms between 1910 and 1936—immediate re-election being forbidden by the constitution, as in many other Latin American countries. Within Costa Rica’s liberal consensus, the party was founded along similarly liberal lines, though appealing to a new social base among local peasant leaders. The Republican Party oversaw the introduction of direct presidential elections in 1913—the president was previously elected via an electoral college—and expanded the franchise. It was also the party in power at the time of the 1917 coup.
Following the restoration of constitutional rule in 1919, Costa Rica experienced several competitive elections as power rotated between different parties and presidents. A secret ballot was introduced in the 1920s, although accusations of fraud and ballot stuffing remained a consistent feature of elections. In fact, it has been argued that the secret ballot actually produced more blatant acts of fraud, albeit at a lower rate, as parties resorted to more extreme measures to influence results.
In 1932, the Republican Party suffered a split, as Ricardo Jiménez—who had served his second term as president between 1924 and 1928—led a breakaway grouping named the National Republican Party, or PRN. Despite the split, the new PRN won the presidential election held that same year, electing Jimenez to a third non-consecutive term. This initiated a period of electoral dominance for the party, which elected its candidate for president in 1936, León Cortés, by a landslide.
Cortés’ presidency was marked by a series of public construction and infrastructure works, including the construction of the country’s first international airport. He also supported new banana plantations, established new ports and introduced banking reforms. Most controversial, however—particularly in subsequent decades—was Cortés affinity with Nazi Germany. At the outset of the Second World War he barred entry to Polish Jews fleeing Nazi authorities, and he even appointed Max Effinger, the German-born leader of Costa Rica’s local Nazi foreign branch, to be his director of migration.
The PRN’s popularity continued to surge during its second term in power. The 1938 midterm election for half the seats of the Constitutional Congress, the country’s legislature, saw the party rise to 62% of the vote, the highest vote share it had yet achieved in any election, and a promising portent ahead of the 1940 presidential election.
As the 1940 election approached, Cortés began exploring ways to run for a second term, despite the constitutional prohibition on doing so. However, he was eventually persuaded not to make any such attempt, and committed to standing down at the end of his term in 1940.
During Cortes’ term, the PRN began to experience another internal division. The influence of its founder, Jiménez, began to wane as he aged—he would be 80 by the time of the 1940 election. At the same time, a young doctor and congressman named Rafael Calderón began to grow in status within the party. Educated in Belgium, where he had been influenced by social Christian ideas, an ideology that fused Christian theology with the political ideals of social welfare, public ownership and egalitarianism, Calderón advocated a shift to the political left. His commitment to these ideas has also been interpreted by some historians as a pragmatic measure to replace the PRN’s declining support among the coffee oligarchs with a new support base in the labour movement.
In doing so, he sought to follow in the footsteps of several other Latin American countries, notably Chile, Uruguay, Brazil, Argentina, Peru and Bolivia, each of which had established social security programmes by the 1930s. In contrast, such programmes were much rarer in Central America, where the ruling, typically liberal elites resisted such reform. Calderón’s political ascendancy thereby challenged the liberal consensus that had prevailed in Costa Rica since the 1870s.
Despite the political stability of the past decade, Calderón’s attitude represented growing discontent with how Costa Rica had handled the Great Depression amid an upsurge of industrial unrest in the 1930s, particularly within banana plantations. Costa Rica’s banana plantations were largely owned by the United Fruit Company, an American company whose presence in central American states directly led to the term ‘banana republic.’
This culminated in the wonderfully named ‘Great Banana Strike’ of 1934, which ended in failure for the workers but contributed to a growing political consciousness among the workers. Growing political attention began to be placed on poverty and economic inequality; communist, socialist and anarchist movements grew in popularity; and immigrant groups began making growing contributions to the labour movement.
Calderón secured the PRN’s nomination in 1940, with the reluctant endorsement of President Cortes, in exchange for a commitment—which would later fall apart—to support Cortes’ candidacy in the 1944 election.
Calderón did not end up facing substantial opposition in the 1940 election. The old Republican Party had withered away, as had the National Party, a liberal party—or, perhaps more accurately, a brand—that had contested elections in 1928 and 1936. Moreover, Calderón maintained his party’s support among the powerful coffee oligarchs. In an attempt to prevent Calderón from taking power, there was a brief bid to coax Ricardo Jiménez into a fourth presidential campaign, but he ultimately declined.
As a result, Calderón faced two opposing parties, neither of which had substantial political or financial backing. One of those parties, the Guanacastecan Brotherhood, did not even seek to represent the entire country, instead focusing on regional interests in the province of Guanacaste in the north-east of Costa Rica since its formation three years earlier. The Brotherhood nominated Virgilio Salazar as its candidate.
The other party was the Costa Rican Communist Party. Founded in 1931, the party was, as might be expected, a member of the Communist International, although it retained some independence from Soviet directives, calling instead for a ‘creole communism’ based on Costa Rican traditions and with a greater focus on rural areas . The party’s candidate was its founding leader, Manuel Mora, who had previously contested the 1936 election against Leon Cortés, winning 5% of the vote.
According to the constitution, whoever won a majority of the vote would be duly elected president. If no candidate won a majority—which, due to there being three candidates, remained a possibility—it fell to the Constitutional Congress to decide which of the two top-placed candidates would be elected. As the Congress was utterly dominated by the PRN by this point, a run-off would effectively ensure a victory for Calderón.
Voting in the election was open to all men over the age of 20, a limit that was lowered to 18 for men who were married or, to quote the constitution, “professors of some science.” Women were denied the vote, a status that would not change until 1949.
The campaign was contested over the radio airwaves and in Costa Rica’s newspapers, which often reprinted speeches delivered over radio. Newspapers also contained news of party activities and, presumably to build a sense of momentum, lists of the names of party supporters.
Calderón largely avoided discussing social welfare or reforms in the campaign, hoping that his party’s structural advantages and his personal popularity could propel him to victory without having to get dragged into divisive issues. Only on the night before the election did he publicly discuss the extent of his plans for social reform, stating that his “fundamental preoccupation” as president would be with the poor.
His assessment was entirely correct. Without facing any great unified opposition, Calderón won the election in a landslide, securing 84.5% of the popular vote. His victory for the PRN was the first time any party had won three successive terms since the 1880s. Calderón’s second closest competitor was Mora, who took 9.9% for the communist cause, nearly doubling his vote share from four years earlier. In last place was Salazar with 5.7%. Turnout was 80.9%, or just over 100,000. This was an increase on 1936, which can be attributed to the introduction of compulsory voting that year.
Calderón swept every province of Costa Rica, though performed slightly less well in Guanacaste due to Salazar’s candidacy. Calderón also very slightly underperformed in the populous central valley region in the geographic centre of the country, though his landslide was so absolute that this did not make any great difference.
There were some allegations of fraud, especially in rural areas, and the lack of any serious competition against Calderón did not suggest the kind of healthy, competitive electoral culture that had existed in Costa Rica in the 1920s and 1930s. Indeed, Lehoucq and Molina describe the 1940s as “one of the most infamous and fraud-ridden” decades in Costa Rican political history—though this would get worse as the decade progressed. The 1940 election itself was somewhat free and fair, at least among the male electorate; even if all the accusations of fraud had been true, it would not have been enough to overturn Calderón’s victory.
Thus, Calderón was sworn into office with a genuine and sizable mandate. The PRN similarly swept the congressional election for half the seats in the Constitutional Congress, building on the party’s landslide for the other half in 1938. This provided a clear majority for Calderón’s agenda.
He put that mandate to good use. 1940 has been identified by historians as a turning point in Costa Rica’s history, when the ‘Liberal State’ that had prevailed for the past 70 years gave way to the ‘Reform State.’
After a slow start focused more on public health measures, he eventually established the Costa Rican social security fund, a public pension and healthcare system. He brought together four independent higher education schools to create the University of Costa Rica, a public university. Calderón’s government also pursued some cautious land reform, allowing people to acquire land on the condition that they cultivated it. In 1942, he implemented the “social guarantees,” which gave workers the right to form unions and strike and introduced a minimum wage. These rights were enshrined in the constitution in 1943.
With these policies, Mark Rosenberg described Calderón as a leader “who reoriented the state as an instrument of the working and middle groups.” Many of these policies were modelled on the welfare state that had been established in Chile, illustrating the transnational and regional influences that fed into Calderón’s policy decisions.
Calderón’s reformist policies faced some resistance in the Constitutional Congress, despite the PRN’s majority. His proposed expansion to the administrative structures that were needed to administer the social security programme proved controversial, as did the programme’s eligibility. What emerged was a system of compulsory social security payments for workers on lower incomes while wealthier citizens could opt out from the system and access private healthcare, a watering down of Calderón’s initial proposals. Unlike other Latin American countries, the eligibility for social security was set by income rather than by profession or trade. In part, these decision were based on the resources available as much as ideological considerations (though those were certainly present); Costa Rica in the early 1940s lacked the resources to establish a more universal public healthcare system.
Calderón also took Costa Rica into the Second World War, joining other central American states in supporting the United States after the attack on Pearl Harbour in 1941. Costa Rica did not make a significant contribution to the war, though it did suffer a German U-boat attack in 1942. More substantial was Costa Rica’s contribution to the American-led internment programme against citizens of Axis countries, under substantial American economic pressure. During the Second World War, most of which fell under Calderón’s presidency, it is estimated that hundreds of German, Italian and Japanese citizens were internally detained or deported to the United States, where they also endured internment. The U-boat attack in 1942 also triggered a wave of anti-German looting in San Pablo, affecting more than 120 German-owned shops.
Opposition to Calderón’s reform agenda, concerns at allegations of electoral fraud—the 1942 congressional mid-term elections saw another landslide victory for the PRN—and, in some quarters, outrage at the treatment of Axis citizens, led to growing opposition, particularly among the coffee oligarchs. Indeed, Germany had been a major source of coffee exports prior to the war, while descendants of German immigrants were well represented among the landowner class. Wartime trade disruption also led to shortages of goods such as food, gasoline, tires, cement and steel, shortages which Calderón’s government proved ill equipped to deal with. Rumours abounded of coup plots, though none came to fruition.
To build societal consent for his reforms and combat his opponents, Calderón assembled a curious civic coalition. On the one hand, he reached out to the Catholic Church, promoting a brand of Christian socialism that he had been influenced by in Belgium. Although he could not bring the entirety of the church behind him, with conservative clergy officials continuing to oppose his agenda, he made considerable inroads.
Notably, he gained the support of the newly seated Archbishop of San José, Victor Sanabria, a figure who had risen from a humble background and who had campaigned for many of the social reforms that Calderón was enacting in power. Like Calderón, Sanabria had also been influenced by the reformist ideas that he had picked up during his time in Europe, which viewed Christian social reformism as an alternative to Marxism.
At the same time, in the second half of his term, Calderón reached an agreement with the Communist Party and Manuel Mora. The party was willing to moderate somewhat in exchange for the opportunity to influence state policy, even changing its name in 1943 to the Popular Vanguard Party and reforming itself along non-communist roots. This helped to glue together Calderón’s alliance; Archbishop Sanabria proceeded to announce that membership of the PVP was compatible with membership of the church.
Indeed, the Communist Party had claimed partial credit for Calderón’s social reforms—the Social Guarantees in particular—stating in 1941 that “We ourselves have fertilized the ground so that the seed can be sown.” This alliance helped Calderón make inroads among parts of the labour movement and also gave Calderón and the PRN Government access to militias under communist control, something that would become significant in the coming years.
The alliance between Calderón, the clergy and communists reshaped Costa Rican politics and laid the foundation for the ideology of Calderonism, a fluid, populist, social Christian outlook that would remain enormously influential throughout the twentieth century and has sometimes been compared to the influence of Peronism in Argentina. Calderón’s critics began accusing him of what they called ‘Caldero-communism’ and of establishing a nascent dictatorship.
Unlike his predecessor, Calderón made no attempt to extend his period in power and stood down at the end of his term in 1944. However, also unlike his predecessor, Calderón had reshaped both the country and his PRN to the extent that he was able to retain substantial influence out of office.
His handpicked successor, Teodoro Picado, the President of the Constitutional Congress and a prominent historian, was endorsed by both Archbishop Sanabria and by Mora and the Popular Vanguard Party, thereby bringing together the entire Calderonist coalition behind his candidacy. Moreover, the PRN Government was growing increasingly comfortable utilising state resources for the benefit of its election campaigns, while accusations of electoral fraud markedly increased throughout the 1940s. Picado accordingly won another landslide victory for the PRN in 1944, against none other than former president León Cortés, who had turned against his former party after Calderón reneged on his pledge to support his candidacy for the PRN.
Although not entirely a puppet of Calderón, Picado’s presidency was very much understood as keeping the seat warm for his predecessor, who indeed sought a second term at the next election in 1948. This election would benefit from its own full episode, but it significantly shaped Calderón’s continuing legacy in Costa Rica.
To very briefly summarise, the PRN’s string of landslide victories that began in 1940 came to an end as Calderón lost fairly decisively to the high-profile newspaper owner, Otilio Ulate. Both sides made accusations of electoral fraud and violence began to spill out onto the streets. The Constitutional Congress, controlled by the PRN and the Popular Vanguard Party, voted to annul the election and call for a new vote, allowing Picado to continue serving as president on an acting basis.
This turn of events precipitated the six-week Costa Rican civil war, when an uprising led by José Figueres, a businessman briefly exiled under Calderón’s presidency, successfully overthrew the Picado Government with the aid of the Caribbean Legion, a transnational group of pro-democracy and Marxist guerillas that included Fidel Castro among its members. Calderón was sent into exile with Picanto while Figueres established a provisional Government that drafted a new constitution. Among other things, the new constitution abolished the Costa Rican military, leaving Costa Rica one of the few countries in the world to this date that does not possess a standing army.
Yet, this spectacular defeat would not be the end of Calderón’s political career. He fled first to Nicaragua and then to Mexico, where he reverted to practising as a doctor. In this time, his political rival, José Figueres, reshaped the Costa Rican state and was democratically elected to a full term in office in the 1950s under the banner of his National Liberation Party, while Calderón’s political reputation was one of failure and disgrace. He gained the status as a villain to Figueres, who assumed a status as a national hero—although, Calderón did retain some support in the country. The PRN was temporarily banned but was permitted to begin contesting elections again from 1953.
Costa Rica’s third post-war president, Mario Echandi, allowed figures from the defeated side of the civil war to return to the country in 1958, including Calderón himself. Not content to return home as a private citizen, Calderón threw himself into political activity once again, getting elected to the Legislative Assembly—the body that replaced the Constitutional Congress under the 1949 constitution—and even made a third attempt at the presidency. In 1962—another election that would warrant its own episode—Calderón went down to a second defeat, this time against Francisco Orlich, an ally of Figueres. Calderón won just 35% of the vote, a far cry from the 85% he achieved in 1940. Ironically, the election was also contested by Otilio Ulate, whose victory Calderón had sought to overturn 14 years previously, though he came a distant third.
Even this defeat did not bring Calderón’s political career to a close, as in 1966 he was appointed Costa Rica’s ambassador to Mexico, the country where he had lived in exile just eight years earlier—quite a redemption arc! He served until 1969 and then, after 36 tumultuous years as a leading figure in Costa Rican politics, died in 1970 at the age of 70.
Nor did Calderón’s death end his influence in Costa Rica. In 1974, he was named ‘Benefactor of the Homeland’ by the Legislative Assembly, and the ideology of Calderonism lived on. A two-party system emerged between the 1970s and 1990s and one of the parties, the Social Christian Unity Party, positioned itself as the inheritor of Calderón’s legacy. The other party was Figueres’ National Liberation Party, ensuring that the political divisions of the 1940s would continue to define Costa Rican politics into the 1990s.
Calderón’s son, Rafael Ángel Calderón, was a key figure in the Social Christian Unity Party, contesting elections in 1982, 1986 and 1990. He was finally successful on the latter occasion, serving as president between 1990 and 1994—when he was succeeded by José María Figueres, the son of José Figueres, who returned to contest a presidential election as recently as 2022. The two-party system was as much a product of those two opposing dynasties as it was deep-rooted ideological differences.
The 1940 Costa Rican presidential election was not, at first glance, especially significant. The PRN remained in control of Costa Rica’s governing institutions and the election was relatively uncontested, allowing Rafael Calderón to be elected president without any great opposition. Yet, the 1940 election set Costa Rica onto a political trajectory that would shape the next half century. Under Calderón, the ‘Liberal State’ gave way to the ‘Reform State’ and the PRN consolidated power throughout the 1940s, only to be overthrown during the dramatic events of 1948. A turning point in Costa Rican history, the political cleavages and dynasties that emerged in the aftermath of the 1940 election provided the country with its key partisan divides for many decades to come.
Such tensions embodied many of the faultlines prevalent in mid-twentieth century global politics, particularly in Latin America. A literal “banana republic,” Costa Rica had a particularly intense experience of debates on the relationship between the state and its citizens; the state’s social responsibilities to the wellbeing of its people, the extent to which it intervenes in their lives to secure that wellbeing, and the form of government that determines such relationships. The 1940 election steered Costa Rica in a much greater interventionist direction and, though not resolved for another eight years, the conflict this course provoked led to Costa Rica’s modern identity as a stable, demilitarised and social democratic country.
Reading List
John A. Booth, ‘Costa Rican Democracy,’ World Affairs 150.1 (Summer 1987), pp. 43-53.
Fabrice E. Lehoucq and Ivan Molina, Stuffing the Ballot Box: Fraud, Electoral Reform, and Democratization in Costa Rica (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2002).
Mark B. Rosenberg, ‘Social Reform in Costa Rica: Social Security and the Presidency of Rafael Angel Calderón,’ Hispanic American Historical Review 61.2 (1981), pp. 278-296.


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In 1989, Taiwan held its last supplementary election under a somewhat strange constitutional system that still operated as if it controlled the entirety of China, and the election marked a step towards the island’s gradual democratisation under President Lee Teng-hui.
Transcript:
Hello, and welcome to the second episode of the History of Elections podcast, where we will be exploring the 1989 supplementary election in Taiwan. The election was the last to be held under a somewhat strange constitutional system that still operated as if it controlled the entirety of China, and the election marked a step towards the island’s gradual democratisation under President Lee Teng-hui.
December, 1989. Revolutions topple communist governments across eastern Europe: the Romanian Revolution overthrows long-term dictator Nicolae Ceaușescu, who is executed within weeks of the first protests; the East German parliament votes to abolish the Socialist Unity Party’s monopoly on power, paving the way for liberal Manfred Gerlach to be elected the first non-communist Chairman of the State Council; Lithuania becomes the first Soviet republic to end the Communist Party’s monopoly on power; and Václav Havel is elected the first non-Communist President of Czechoslovakia since 1948. Elsewhere, rebel forces led by Charles Taylor cross the border into Liberia from Ivory Coast, triggering the First Liberian Civil War; the United States launches an invasion of Panama—a sentence that gave me less anxiety when I first wrote it a month ago—to overthrow the country’s dictator, Manuel Noriega, who had clung on to power after losing an election; the Japanese Nikkei 225 stock market index reaches a record high, continuing a remarkable trend of what seemed to be endless growth; and, in Taiwan, voters went to the polls in a supplementary election to the Republic of China’s parliament.
Background
The modern polity of Taiwan emerged out of the Chinese Civil War, when the defeated nationalist forces, led by Chiang Kai-shek, fled to the island in 1949 in what was intended to be a temporary retreat until—it was hoped—they could launch a renewed invasion of the mainland and the people of mainland China would rise up to overthrew the Communist Party.
Taiwan had previously been occupied by Japan for 50 years between 1895 and 1945, reverting to Chinese administration upon Japan’s defeat in the Second World War. Taiwan’s history prior to that lies at the heart of the modern debate over its constitutional status: the island has been inhabited by an indigenous Austronesian people for about 15,000 years but, from 1684, the island was annexed and colonised by the Qing Dynasty of China. Today, indigenous Taiwanese make up just 2 per cent of the island’s population, but this constitutional history contributed to a broader political tendency in postwar Taiwan that rejects, either in part or in full, Chinese claims to the island.
Following the civil war, Taiwan has been administered as a continuation of the Republic of China, with control only over the island of Taiwan itself and some nearby smaller islands. The victorious communist forces of Mao Zedong, which ruled mainland China as the People’s Republic of China, or PRC, from 1949, lacked the military capability to invade the island and, as the United States adopted a policy of containment against communist states, it was later deterred by the threat of American intervention from making any attempt to do so.
Thus, Taiwan existed as a de facto state, although it claimed to be the continuation of the legitimate Chinese Government – and indeed, the administration in Taiwan represented the entirety of China at the United Nations until 1971, a status that, in the early 1960s, US President John Kennedy commented, ‘really doesn’t make any sense.’
The island was governed by Chiang Kai-shek and his Kuomintang Party, or KMT, under a dominant-party system, Chiang serving as the ‘President of the Republic of China’ until his death in 1975. For some Taiwanese, this government represented rule by a class of ‘mainlanders’ who had previously governed mainland China and comprised 10 to 20% of the island’s population.
Viewing itself as the legitimate government of China at a time of crisis, Chiang’s KMT government ruled the island under martial law – or, officially, the Temporary Provisions Effective During the Period of National Mobilization for Suppression of the Communist Rebellion. This was considered necessary in light of the ongoing threat of invasion from the mainland.
This marked a continuation of how the island had been governed even before the conclusion of the civil war. In 1947, an uprising in Taiwan was violently suppressed by government forces—then representing nationalist forces based in the mainland. Information on this event, which has come to be known as the ‘February 28 incident,’ was effectively suppressed, but tens of thousands of people are believed to have been killed during the uprising and in the subsequent crackdown. This violent repression, referred to as the ‘White Terror,’ continued after KMT forces retreated to the island in 1949. Notably, in the aftermath of this uprising, discussions within the United States government on resolving the situation in Taiwan took it for granted that the island’s population would opt for independence if given a free vote.
In accordance with the Republic of China’s constitution, although orchestrated under martial law and the KMT’s grip on power, Chiang Kai-shek was re-elected President through indirect votes in parliament held every six years, using emergency measures to bypass the constitutional term limit. The system was not entirely a one-party state and had two legally-permitted opposition parties—the China Democratic Socialist Party and the Young China Party—but the KMT maintained absolute control over state institutions. After one theoretically contested vote in 1954, when Chiang won 96.9% of parliamentary ballots, he was elected unopposed in 1960, 1966 and 1972.
Competitive elections were tolerated at the district level, although the ban on opposition parties meant that critics of the regime had to run as independents in an uneven political landscape where pro-Government candidates received financial and campaign support from the KMT. Moreover, local politicians who were deemed to pose a substantial threat to the KMT continued to be persecuted, encouraging genuine opposition politicians to remain focused on local issues.
This autocratic system continued upon Chiang’s death. After a three-year interlude in which Chiang’s Vice President, Yen Chia-kan, fulfilled the remainder of his term, Chiang’s son, Chiang Ching-kuo, the former head of the island’s secret police and the incumbent Premier, was elected unopposed by parliamentarians in 1978 and again in 1984.
At the legislative level, Taiwan continued to be governed by the Republic of China’s parliament, which also decamped to the island in 1949. The parliament operated under a tricameral structure, with the lower house Legislative Yuan, upper house Control Yuan, and the National Assembly, which was charged with electing the President and Vice President and amending the constitution. As a representative body for the entirety of China, these three houses could not be re-elected or replenished by mainland territories under the control of the Chinese Communist Party.
Thus, their members—an overwhelming majority of whom represented mainland districts—held their seats until the day that an election could be conducted on the mainland. It became increasingly clear that this meant holding their seats for life in a structure known as the ‘non-re-elected congress.’ Upon the death of a sitting member, mainland exiles from the same region of China were appointed to take their place.
Supplementary Elections and Gradual Reform
As time passed and it became apparent that the KMT would not sweep back to power in the mainland, this system slowly began to adapt to the reality that it solely represented Taiwan. Mainland members who died off were not replaced at the same rate and new elected seats for the island of Taiwan gradually began to be created. These seats were predominantly filled by supplementary elections, the first of which was held in 1969, but some seats to represent overseas nationals were appointed by the president. The new representatives initially comprised less than 3% of the total parliament, but this proportion grew over time.
The elections began to be held every three years for the Legislative Yuan and every six years for the National Assembly. The electoral process remained dominated by the KMT, which won the vast majority of seats in every election held under Chiang dynastic rule, alongside a small number of government-friendly independents and representatives from the Young China Party. The majority of representatives elected in these elections tended to be native-born Taiwanese, and the elections ensured that Taiwan was more heavily represented in the parliament—which continued to claim to represent the entirety of China—than its population alone could justify. These elections can thereby be viewed as marking the early foundations of a distinctly Taiwanese legislature.
Despite Chiang Ching-kuo’s former role as director of the island’s secret police, having overseen arbitrary arrests, torture and execution of political opponents, as President, he began to loosen some of the political restrictions that had been imposed by his father.
The early years of his presidency were not promising in that regard. The Tangwai movement, meaning ‘outside the party,’ had emerged in the 1970s demanding political reform and a greater emphasis on Taiwanese identity. The movement exploded onto the political scene amid riots in 1977 triggered by a blatant act of vote rigging in a local election. Such demands were fuelled by Taiwan’s emerging economic prosperity—between 1953 and 1990, the state averaged a 9% annual growth in GDP—and its growing middle class.
In 1979, security services cracked down on pro-democracy activists and arrested the Tangwai leadership. The crackdown was in part an attempt by Chiang Ching-kuo to manage relations with KMT hardliners, but he continued tentative steps towards political opening in the 1980s.
The Democratic Progressive Party, or DPP, was formed out of the Tangwai movement in 1986. The party was not initially legally recognised by the authorities, but nor was it forcibly dismantled, and its members were allowed to contest elections as independent candidates. Chiang Ching-kuo proceed to formally end the island’s state of martial law in 1987, allowing for a further degree of political opening in Taiwan.
These reforms were partly motivated by the Republic of China’s diminishing global status. The western détente with the People’s Republic of China in the 1970s helped pave the way for formal recognition of the reality that, at this point, had existed for over 20 years. In 1971, the Republic of China lost its recognition at the United Nations, and in 1979 the United States formally recognised the People’s Republic. As the PRC demanded sole recognition as the representative government of China, this required formally—if not necessarily informally—cutting ties with Taipei.
By the 1980s, only a few dozen states continued to recognise the Republic of China, leaving the state internationally isolated—although it continued to receive support from the United States. Thus, political reform was seen as a means of improving relations with western states. However, Chiang never relinquished the KMT’s firm control over state institutions, and meaningful electoral competition was never allowed under his rule.
Chiang Ching-kuo died in 1988 at the age of 77. Despite an attempt by KMT hardliners to hijack the succession, he was succeeded by his vice president and heir apparent, Lee Teng-hui, a Christian, Taiwan-born politician and American-educated agricultural economist who had previously served as Mayor of Taipei, the Republic of China’s acting capital. Chiang had committed in 1985 that his successor would not be another member of his family, declaring that such a question ‘only exists in despotic and totalitarian countries,’ and not in the Republic of China—and he got his wish.
Lee continued Chiang Ching-kuo’s political reforms and, over time, revealed himself to be politically closer to the pro-democracy activists and Taiwanese sovereigntists than anyone had expected. His ascension to power has been described by Jonathan Manthorpe as the ‘end of mainlander colonialism in the island.’
Lee released political prisoners and appointed substantial numbers of native-born Taiwanese to the government, further eroding the dominance of mainlanders and their descendants. Lee also began to allow, or even encourage, symbols of Taiwanese identity and statehood, a process of ‘Taiwanization’ that gradually moved away from the legal fiction that his government represented the entirety of China. Bank notes were printed by the central bank rather than the Provincial Bank of Taiwan, and the Taiwan Provincial Government was weakened.
In this environment of political liberalisation, there began the stirrings of a national debate—which continues to this day—on whether Taiwan should formalise its independence, establish a new constitution and declare itself an independent country, rather than maintaining its legal identity as the Republic of China. This debate played out in the press and advocates of independence were more commonly found among veterans of the Tangwai movement and the DPP. One such article, published in the United Daily News paper, argued for a new constitution on the grounds that the existing 1947 Republic of China constitution treated Taiwan as a ‘little child wearing oversized shoes.’
Opponents of such a path, which included the KMT, remained committed to the mission of overthrowing communism in the Chinese mainland—a prospect that seemed more likely in the late 1980s, as the PRC entered a period of political turmoil. Alternatively, if communism did prevail in the mainland, it was feared that a formal declaration of independence could provide the PRC with a justification to launch a naval blockade on the island. James Soong, the KMT general secretary of the KMT, claimed that independence would turn Taiwan into ‘another Beirut,’ referring to the devastation and foreign intervention produced by the ongoing Lebanese Civil War.
The 1989 Supplementary Election Campaign
That brings us to the supplementary election held in December 1989, the seventh such election since the system of supplementary elections was introduced in 1969. 130 new seats in the Legislative Yuan were created, the largest number yet for a supplementary election. Only 101 of these seats were elected in the ‘Taiwan Province,’ alongside the municipalities of Taipei and Kaohsiung, with the other 29 seats appointed by the president to represent overseas nationals.
This was the first election held since Lee Teng-hui ascended to the presidency to complete the remainder of Chiang Ching-kuo’s term, and also the first to be held since the revocation of martial law. Although some liberalisation had taken place, this was not a free, fair or pluralistic election, with numerous accusations of vote-buying, bribery, illicit campaign financing and other irregularities made against both Government and opposition candidates. Violent attacks against candidates—particularly those that had defected from the KMT—also led some to begin wearing bullet-proof vests as they campaigned.
In the 1989 Freedom House Report, on a scale of 2 to 14, with 2 being most free and 14 being least free, Taiwan scored a middling score of 8, compared to mainland China’s score or 12. Those numbers should be caveated by the fact that, prior to 1990, Freedom House’s numbers were largely the product of one social scientist with some reported bias in favour of US allies; but the numbers provide a general baseline for understanding Taiwan in this period as an autocratic but not totalitarian state.
Ahead of the supplementary election, the Legislative Yuan contained 308 members, within which the KMT held a supermajority of 275 members. With the addition of just 101 elected members, it was mathematically impossible for the KMT to lose its majority, meaning that, at face value, the stakes were pretty low.
However, there was nevertheless increased political competition. Notably, this included within the KMT itself, which held primary elections six months ahead of the legislative election to nominate its candidates, granting greater power to its claimed 2 million party members to influence the party’s direction. According to Ts’ai Ling and Ramon H. Myers, ‘a new spirit of activism swept the rank and file’ of the KMT, resulting in the nomination of candidates that had not been supported by the senior party leadership. Once the primaries were over, the KMT campaigned on its 40-year record of ruling Taiwan, emphasising its experience in driving economic prosperity and social stability.
Members of the DPP also contested the election. The party was undergoing a process of ideological radicalisation towards a position that favoured an explicitly independent national identity for Taiwan, breaking away from the island’s identity as the Republic of China. This process was driven by the return of overseas pro-independence activists who had previously been banned from Taiwan.
The DPP’s chairperson, Huang Hsin-chieh, was from a Taiwanese family and had sat as one of the permanent legislators in the Legislative Yuan since 1969. A founder of the Tangwai movement, he had been arrested in 1979 and was imprisoned until 1987. The party’s official strategy was to ‘use the localities to surround the centre,’ seeking to build grassroots support and win local offices in order to increase pressure on the KMT. The KMT countered this with a strategy of consolidating support with local clients and patrons.
The DPP’s formal political platform called for various reforms of the political system, including democratic reforms to the legislature, direct elections for the president, provincial governor and the mayors of Taipei and Kaohsiung, strengthening the independence of the judiciary and increasing civilian oversight over the military. It also called for tax cuts, privatisations, environmental protections, and pointed to the positive record of its party members who had been elected to magistrate positions across Taiwan. Going into the election, the DPP’s aim was to elect 20 new members, which would give the party enough support in parliament to have the right to introduce legislation, and to reach 30% of the popular vote.
The election was also contested by the Young China Party, which remained friendly towards the KMT government.
On average, each seat in the Legislative Yuan was contested by three candidates, providing a degree of electoral competition. The KMT provided more candidates than any other party, nominating 139 candidates, which was more than the 101 seats available due to a breakdown of party discipline in some seats, another indication of the party’s eroding central control. The DPP nominated 58 candidates and the Young China Party nominated 3 candidates, alongside 100 other independent and minor party candidates. The vast majority of candidates—86%—were men, with just 26 women running for parliament. Some of these women ran for the DPP to represent husbands who had been imprisoned, disappeared or killed under KMT rule.
During the election campaign, former dissidents such as Lin Yi-hsiung and Kuo Pei-hung toured Taiwan holding rallies calling for independence and support for the DPP, an indication of the more liberal environment that the election took place in.
The election was observed by a number of foreign observers, including the chairman of the United States House Foreign Affairs Subcommittee on Asia, Stephen Solarz, and hundreds of foreign correspondents.
Polling ahead of the election consistently found leads for the KMT, in some cases very sizable leads. However, it also detected substantial voter apathy, suggesting a lower turnout than in past elections.
Elections were also held to elect country magistrates, county councils, city mayoralties, city councils and the Taiwan Provincial Council, with similar results.
Results and Aftermath
On election day, 12.6 million Taiwanese were eligible to vote. The polling was proved wrong as turnout reached a 10-year high of 72%. Election day was generally peaceful, with the exception of in Hsinying, where supporters of the local DPP candidate attacked the county government office, in a race that also saw the KMT make erroneous accusations of ballot-rigging.
As expected, the KMT swept the elections at both the legislative and local level. Of the 101 directly elected seats available to the Legislative Yuan, the KMT picked up 72, with 21 going to the DPP—just over the party’s target of 20. Of the total seats added to the Legislative Yuan, the Kuomintang represented 94—an even greater majority. The KMT won 59.7% of the popular vote, down from the two-thirds it normally tended to win; a modest reduction in support. Meanwhile, the DPP won 28.7%, close to its target of securing 30% of the vote.
This marked a decisive victory for the KMT and demonstrated that there was real popular support for the party even once some of the political restrictions began to be lifted. Contemporary analyses drew comparisons with elections held across Eastern Europe in 1989, where authoritarian regimes that had been in power for a similar length of time were swept from power once their monopoly on power was removed. It was clear that similar developments would not take place in Taiwan.
Nevertheless, the KMT was disappointed with its result, and many of its leaders apologised after the election for what they considered to be a poor result. Lee Teng-hui described the result as a ‘defeat,’ and James Soong travelled to the seven counties where the KMT had lost magistrate and mayor races and vowed to win them back at the next election. Other officials within the KMT mused on the implications of accepting the DPP as Taiwan’s formal opposition.
The election was held just six months after the Tiananmen Square protests and massacre in Beijing, when a concurrent pro-democracy movement in the PRC was brutally suppressed by the military, which opened fire on protesters, most of whom were students, producing a death toll into the hundreds and perhaps even thousands. Thousands more activists were detained, imprisoned, tortured and executed in the months after the crackdown. The massacre did not in itself directly influence the election in Taiwan, as the KMT government attempted to suppress media reporting of the event in order to maintain its stable relations with the PRC. However, it can be seen as another turning point in the political trajectories of Taiwan and the Chinese mainland; where one gradually offered concessions to the democracy movement and liberalised its political system, the other responded with force and oppression.
The 1989 supplementary election would be Taiwan’s last supplementary election held under the system established in 1969. As he settled into power, Lee Teng-hui accelerated the country’s process of democratisation. Taiwan participated in what has sometimes been described as the ‘third wave of democratisation’ between the 1970s and 1990s, a process that consolidated after the end of the Cold War, as Soviet-aligned countries adapted to the loss of their major sponsor, and US-aligned countries—like Taiwan—could no longer solely rely on their status as anti-communist bulwarks to continue gaining western support.
In 1991, Lee Teng-hui ended the practice of lifetime membership in the Legislative Yuan and National Assembly, paving the way for legislative elections in 1991 and 1992 that reflected the now 40-year reality of political life in the island and elected members who solely represented Taiwan. The KMT retained a majority in both elections but they proved far more competitive than any that that had been held previously. This then led to the first direct presidential election in 1996 in which Lee was re-elected under broadly free and fair conditions and then, ultimately, Taiwan’s first democratic transition of power in 2000, when the DPP narrowly gained control of the presidency. Stepping down peacefully at the end of his term in 2000, Lee has come to be known by the monicker of ‘Mr Democracy.’
Taiwan’s 1989 supplementary election marked an end point for an era of the island’s political history characterised by KMT autocratic rule and political structures that operated under the assumption of imminent reunification with the mainland. Elements of the changes that would occur in Taiwanese politics were perceptible in the results: the expanded number of Taiwanese representatives, moving closer to an acceptance that the legislature represented the island of Taiwan rather than the entirety of China, and growing political representation for the political opposition led by the DPP.
These developments also fuelled continued conflict with the PRC in two key ways. Firstly, the KMT’s willingness to loosen its grip on power and allow for greater pluralism gave representation to those who advocated a greater focus on Taiwanese identity, or even an outright declaration of Taiwanese independence and an abandonment of the polity’s identity as the Republic of China. The act of dismantling the pan-Chinese parliamentary institutions to focus on representation within Taiwan itself signalled to Beijing that the island was moving in such a direction. Secondly, the emergence of democracy and political pluralism in Taiwan has threatened the PRC’s claims that such a political system is incompatible with Chinese culture and history and provided a nearby, alternative model of governance, an issue that the policy of ‘one country, two systems’—as also applied to Hong Kong—has attempted to resolve.
I personally find this period of Taiwanese history really interesting because of what it can tell us about the role of island geographies in driving political differentiation. In an extremely different context, I completed a PhD last year exploring how island geographies have contributed to distinctive attitudes towards politics and constitutional issues in island communities in Scotland, and I found that, in these communities, many people have a belief that their ‘islandness’ warrants separate policies and, at times, separate governing arrangements from the mainland. Taiwan is a very different context, both culturally and historically, but it is clearly an example of how an island geography has facilitated a differentiated political development through, in this case, military logistics—it is hard to invade islands—and separate historical, cultural and social development.
Lee Teng-hui lived until the age of 97, dying in 2020. The President at the time, Tsai Ing-wen, who was the DPP’s second President, granted full honours to the leader whose democratising policies had made it possible for her to come to power. At his funeral, she vowed to ‘continue along the path of democracy, freedom, diversity and openness’ that he had charted.
Thank you for listening, and join us next time as we travel back to the 1940 general election in Costa Rica, held towards the tail-end of the first Costa Rican Republic as a period of stability gave way to civil war.
Further Reading:
Tien, Hung-mao, & Shiau, Chyuan-heng, ‘Taiwan’s Democratization: A Summary,’ World Affairs 155.2 (Fall 1992), pp. 58-61.
Mainwaring, Scott, & Bizzarro, Fernando, ‘The Fates of Third-Wave Democracies,’ Journal of Democracy 30.1 (January 2019), pp. 99-113.
Manthorpe, Jonathan, Forbidden Nation: A History of Taiwan (New York: Palgrave Macmillan, 2005).
Ts’ai, Ling & Myers, Ramon H., ‘Winds of Democracy: The 1989 Taiwan Elections,’ Asian Survey 30.4 (April 1990), pp. 360-379.


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