In Haiti, President Michel Martelly, who took office in May 2011, has nominated his third prime minister. The first two nominations were rejected by parliament, one by the lower house and one by the upper house.

The new nominee is Garry Conille, a UN administrator. He was a former minister under Jean-Claude Duvalier. There is some information in French about him here.

Since the previous nominee was rejected, there have been discussions between the president and members of the Senate and the National Assembly. However, there is no sense, publicly anyway, that this nomination is the result of any sort of deal between the president and the legislature. It looks as if this is another nominee that the president wants the legislature to accept on its merits.

If so, then it is not obvious why this nomination will succeed where others have failed. The logic of Haiti’s premier-presidential constitution is that the president should appoint a cohabitation PM. Instead, President Martelly is acting like a president-parliamentary leader and keeps nominating independents, hoping to manufacture a majority.

In this regard, there was an interesting article in Le Nouvelliste yesterday, citing the former prime minister, Jean-Max Bellerive. He commented that cohabitation was “too sophisticated” (his words) for Haiti. He said that cohabitation was likely to occur only in countries with strong and organised parties and that this was not the case in Haiti. It is an interesting hypothesis.