Updated below

Benin has a presidential election today. Benin is a former French colony, previously known as Dahomey, on what was once called the “Slave Coast” of west Africa. The country has been rated as “free” by Freedom House continuously since their 1991-92 survey.

President Mathieu Kerekou is ineligible to run again, due to both a two-term limit and an age limit. He has been president for all but five years since initially taking power in a coup in 1972, after which he declared Marxism-Leninism the official ideology before later leading the country into electoral politics (see BBC’s country profile). The five years when he was out of power represented the period after the first competitive election (1991-96): the presidency of his long-time rival, Nicephore Soglo, who is also banned due to the age limit. As Fontaine notes at Yebo Gogo, a struggling economy will be a challenge to whoever is elected.

While Benin has been continuously democratic for around sixteen years now–an impressive record for such a poor country–the constitutional bans on the “old men” running yet again means that this is the country’s first election that has been wide open. There are twenty six candidates, of whom three are considered serious contenders: Adrien Houngbedji (Democratic Renewal Party), Bruno Amoussou (Social Democrat), and Yayi Boni (a nonparty evangelical Christian). Soglo’s son, Lehady, is also in the running, under the Benin Renaissance banner.

If no candidate obtains a majority today, there will be a runoff in about two weeks.

Benin’s constitution establishes a presidential system. Unlike many African democracies–especially many former French colonies–Benin’s constitution does not establish a premier as the head of government. That makes Benin more akin to the USA or typical Latin American presidential systems (as well as Liberia and a few former British African colonies), in that the president is head of government as well as head of state.

Aside from not having to share executive powers with an assembly agent, the president of Benin is quite weak constitutionally–one of the weakest in the world, actually. Consider his veto power. He may return a bill to the assembly, which must debate it again, but then:

Le vote pour cette seconde délibération est acquis à la majorité absolue des membres composant l’Assemblée Nationale. Si après ce dernier vote, le Président de la République refuse de promulguer la loi, la Cour Constitutionnelle, saisie par le président de l’Assemblée Nationale, déclare la loi exécutoire si elle est conforme à la Constitution [Art. 57].

In other words, his veto cannot be sustained against the wishes of a majority of all members of the assembly, and the constitution has safeguards against the possibility that the president might still refuse to carry out his administrative duty to promulgate a law (provided it is constitutional) that was passed over his veto.

The executive has some additional lawmaking power, through constitutional delimitation of policy areas that are in the domain of ordinance rather than loi, but this list of areas in domaine de la loi (Art. 98) is quite extensive (more so than in the French constitution, for example, where the assembly has a premier whom it may oust via a no confidence vote, unlike in Benin). There is even a striking limitation on the potential tendency of a pro-presidential majority to want to delegate its lawmaking powers to the executive (which is a common practice in many Latin American presidential systems, for example): If a policy area is in the domaine de la loi, an act of delegation may be passed, but only by a two-thirds majority (Art. 102).

Benin’s record of democracy, while hardly unblemished, is quite good and thus defies the claims of many political scientists (not me among them) that presidential systems are inherently prone to crisis in less developed countries.¹ The constitutional powers were allocated as if the designers were well aware of this political-science literature, seeking to delimit and constrain presidential authority.

They apparently were not aware, however, of the skepticism among political scientists of presidential systems with nonconcurrent legislative elections (with me very much in the forefront on this point²). The assembly was last elected in 2003, and an alliance of parties favoring Kerekou won 55.8% of the votes and 53 of the 82 seats (around 65%).³ If the president elected today (or in the subsequent runoff) is not from this alliance, governance could be very difficult, at least until the renewal of the legislature next March. With such a weak veto, a president who faced majority opposition would be the executive in only the most literal sense: Executing laws that he opposed, and seeing his own legislative initiatives blocked. Given that the two big legislative alliances hide considerable internal fragmentation,⁴ such a clearly opposed executive-legislative division would seem unlikely, fortunately.

Of course, for him to retain this control would require that the parties that were in alliance with Kerekou, as well as his own, resist being “bought” by the new president. In systems with regionally or ethnically based parties and constitutionally strong presidencies, the president almost always brings legislators over to his side by offering patronage or pork-barrel payoffs.

However, the weakness of the presidency under Benin’s constitution probably gives an ex-president (i.e. Kerekou, soon) greater prospects for continuing influence over the legislators that supported him during his presidency. Still, even a weak president has patronage to offer by virtue of his heading the executive branch. How the Kerekou allies respond will be crucial to how this unusual case of constitutionally weak presidentialism functions under divided government.