Abstract
This article argues that Haiti’s new president, Michel Martelly, represents a populist-authoritarian project that combines limited forms of inclusion with repression in an effort to stabilize Haiti’s polarized social structure. Nearly a decade after a UN stabilization mission was deployed to resolve Haiti’s perennial class conflict in the interests of its small elite, Michel Martelly’s populist authoritarianism signifies a homegrown attempt to break through the class stalemate through a reconstructed security state, weak social policies, new mechanisms of co-optation, and a nationalist discourse that obfuscates the country’s social conflicts. In this sense, Martelly has emerged as Haiti’s Caesar in a general process of authoritarian regression within the longstanding struggle to create a more democratic society. The article adopts a neo-Gramscian perspective to understand the national and transnational dimensions of this struggle and its relationship to larger processes of democratization in Latin America and the Caribbean.
