All Presidencies Are Not Created Equal : Haiti: With the present constitution, returning Aristide to power may prove futile.

Restoring Jean-Bertrand Aristide to office in Haiti is not the same as restoring him to power. There is no evidence, however, that U.S. policy-makers are aware of the distinction, or how it affects the prospects for establishing stable democracy in Haiti.

We have a tendency to assume that presidencies all over are more or less the same--that all are endowed with substantial authority. In fact, the constitutional powers of presidents vary enormously. Many wield far greater formal powers than U.S. presidents, and some, Haiti’s included, have virtually no political authority.

Haiti’s president does not control the composition of the executive branch. He does not name the members of the cabinet and cannot dismiss them. This authority is given to Parliament. The Haitian president, moreover, has no formal lawmaking authority. He does not exercise a veto, nor does he have any authority to issue legislative decrees or executive orders. This is all the domain of a prime minister and cabinet who answer to the legislature, not to the president.

The sole source of power for a Haitian president comes from being the only government official elected by a nationwide constituency. This should give the president a say in national policy-making, but without any formal authority, the choice can come down to pursuing an agenda by unconstitutional means or not at all.

This was precisely what happened in September, 1991, when a congressional majority tried to dismiss Aristide’s choice for prime minister. The Haitian military justified removing Aristide on the grounds that the president was inciting demonstrations to intimidate lawmakers from exercising their constitutional authority to choose the government.

The point is not whether Aristide or the military was more to blame for the breakdown of democracy three years ago. It is that a constitution providing for a popularly elected president, but giving that president no formal authority, is logically inconsistent, and could easily reproduce crises that threaten the stability of democracy.

There are other stable democracies with elected, but largely powerless, presidents. A few European parliamentary systems allow for the popular election of presidents who serve effectively as ceremonial heads of state. Ireland, Iceland and Austria are examples. In these cases, however, the institution of a government responsible to parliament was established well before the elected presidency. Ceremonial presidents were introduced in the European cases to replace ceremonial monarchs as heads of state, without altering the basic form of government. There were no political expectations attached to the idea of a presidential mandate.

The opposite was true in Haiti when Aristide was elected in 1990. Without any tradition of parliamentary supremacy--or any tradition of stable democratic institutions of any sort--Aristide supporters were understandably frustrated by the inability of their champion to control policy through formal channels.

What’s more, the pending agreement, which centers on Aristide’s return to office, only reinforces the disjuncture between expectations and likely results. Aristide, arriving with an escort of 15,000 U.S. troops and an eventual multinational peacekeeping force, will certainly encounter citizens who expect action and results from the president, whether they support or oppose him.

All of this brings us to the goal of the U.S. mission in Haiti. Does it involve “fixing” the Haitian constitution, to bring powers of the president in line with the expectations surrounding the office? The Clinton Administration has given no hint that such a plan exists, or even that it is aware of Aristide’s powerlessness. Indeed, the Administration is adamant that its purpose is not to build a nation, but rather to simply restore stability and a constitutional government.

The problem is that stability and the current constitution might be fundamentally incompatible. In addition to its litany of other problems, Haiti has a bad constitution. In restoring it as it stands, we may be regenerating a cycle of political instability.