THE SEMI-PRESIDENTIAL ONE

This is another in a series of posts that records the cases of ‘divided executive’ in countries with semi-presidential constitutions. I define a divided executive as the situation where the president and prime minister are from different parties but where the president’s party is represented in the cabinet. This is different from ‘cohabitation’ where the president’s party is not represented in the cabinet. Presidents classed as non-party cannot generate any periods of divided executive or cohabitation. All presidential and prime ministerial affiliations are taken from the relevant page of worldstatesmen.org.

Burundi had a semi-presidential constitution from 1992 until the coup in 1996 and the suspension of the constitution. See details in previous entry here. In 1993 a power-sharing agreement was reached. This led to the posts of president and PM being shared between the mainly Tutsi UPRONA and the mainly Hutu FRODEBU.

For what it’s worth, I think Burundi is a good example of why it is useful to record all cases of divided executive. Given, for many, the main advantage of semi-presidentialism is the ability for opposing forces to share power, we need to know how many times this has occurred and what the result has been. Obviously, in the Burundi case it did not stop the violence or the collapse of whatever amount of democracy there was in the country during the period of semi-presidentialism (and the same might be said, in very different circumstances, for the case of the Austrian First Republic in the previous post).

Anyway, here is my list of divided executives in Burundi:

10 Jul 1993 - 25 Jul 1996

Presidents - Melchior Ndadaye, Cyprien Ntaryamira, Sylvestre Ntibantunganya (all FRODEBU)

PMs - Sylvie Kinigi, Anatole Kanyenkiko, Antoine Nduwayo (all UPRONA)

Cabinet - FRODEBU, UPRONA, PP, RDB

Party abbreviations:

FRODEBU - Front pour la Démocratie au Burundi (Front for Democracy in Burundi)

UPRONA - Union pour le Progrès national (Union for National Progress)

PP - Parti populaire (People’s Party)

RDB - Rassemblement pour le Peuple du Burundi (Rally for the People of Burundi)

Previous posts in this series:

Austria (First Republic)