Suriname elected a new president on Monday, ending the long government of Desi Bouterse, which has dominated the politics of the small South American nation since its independence through intimidation and charisma.
President Chan Santokhi, a 61-year-old former police chief and opposition leader, was elected to office by the Surinamese Congress after a landslide victory for the opposition in the May general election.
By handing Mr. Santokhi a victory, the Surinamese punished Mr. Bouterse, a former military dictator-turned-populist champion, for a disastrous economic crisis and widespread corruption in his government.
Santokhi is taking over a deeply divided nation on the brink of bankruptcy and fighting to contain the coronavirus, which has infected 741 people and killed 18.
“We are on the brink of a financial abyss,” Santokhi said in Congress on Monday, when he promised to unite Suriname’s ethnically diverse citizens. “This crisis has overcome all the worst scenarios we had hoped for.”
Suriname’s longer-term prospects look brighter as the country is expected to begin exploiting the main offshore oil discoveries by 2026.
The new government will have to rebuild Suriname’s damaged relations with the Netherlands, Suriname’s former colonial ruler and its main trading partner, whose judges had convicted Bouterse of drug trafficking in absentia in 1999.
In the past 10 years in office, Bouterse had displaced Suriname’s foreign alliances away from the Netherlands and toward China and neighboring Venezuela, whose redistributive economic policies and anti-imperialist rhetoric he copied in his country.
Bouterse leaves office when he appeals another criminal conviction, this time in his country, for his role in the murder of 15 prominent political opponents after a 1980 military coup. Although he loses his presidential immunity, it is unclear whether he will serve the sentence of 20 years that the court ruled.
As police chief, Mr. Santokhi had investigated Mr. Bouterse for his role in the coup-related violence, a deeply traumatic event for the previous generation in Suriname known as the “December murders”.
However, some in Suriname fear that trying to enforce the murder sentence could provoke unrest by well-organized Bouterse supporters and make the small nation ungovernable. After four decades of running the country in different ways, Bouterse maintains strong connections in the Suriname army, has great personal fortune, and enjoys worship from a loyal base.
But as a sign of conciliation, Bouterse, an elected lawmaker, made a rare appearance in Congress on Monday, where he congratulated the new government. “From experience, I can tell you it will not be an easy job,” said Bouterse.
In an attempt to maintain his support before the elections, Bouterse raided the reserves of private banks and imposed restrictions on exchange rates earlier this year. The measures proved popular with their main supporters, but provoked an unprecedented backlash from the private sector and devastated an already damaged economy.
Economic mismanagement turned out to be the downfall of Mr. Bouterse. The Surinamese abandoned its ruling party en masse, voting for many of its main allies out of power.
Mr. Bouterse’s chief economic policy maker, Amzad Abdoel, received 117 votes out of the more than 70,000 cast in his congressional district.
