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2 Repetitive Breakdowns and a Decade of Experimentation Institutional Choices and Unstable Democracy in Niger Leonardo A. Villalón and Abdourahmane Idrissa In contrast to most other African countries, Niger never enjoyed even the brief mirage of a multiparty democracy before the 1990s. In spite of an intense party competition within the colonial context in the 1950s, under the regime of Hamani Diori the consolidation of single-party rule and the personalization of power had already begun—with French collusion—even before independence in 1960 (Charlick 1991, 40–62). Diori’s reign itself was ended in 1974 by a coup that brought to power a military regime under Lieutenant Colonel Seyni Kountché. Kountché attempted to capitalize on a boom in uranium export prices to consolidate power via the elaboration of a corporatist state apparatus, but his regime otherwise represented significant continuities in terms of its authoritarian nature (Robinson 1991). Although Kountché always presented his rule as a régime d’exception, whose eventual goal was the re-establishment of “republican” (i.e., democratic) institutions, it was only after his death in 1987 that the first tentative steps toward the liberalization of politics were undertaken by his successor, Ali Saïbou. The “constitutional normalization” launched by Saïbou, however, was intended as a carefully controlled process under the tutelage of a hierarchically institutionalized single party, never described by the regime itself in terms of “democratization” (Charlick 1991, 76). And yet despite this bleak history, and like much of Africa, Niger found itself caught up in the worldwide “wave” of pro-democracy agitation and protest in the early 1990s. Unable to master the situation, Saïbou was obliged in 1991 to agree to the holding of a National Conference, a turbulent affair, but one that managed to establish “democracy” as the sole legitimating standard for subsequent regimes. What has particularly distinguished Niger even in Africa, however, has been the extraor27 dinary turbulence of the effort to actually meet that standard, and the dramatic swings in a decade-long, political roller coaster ride. A count of the decade’s major events reads like a litany of chaos: four republics, and hence four constitutions with presidential or semipresidential regimes; three transitions of six, nine, and eighteen months; one National Conference and a Committee on Fundamental Texts; one Forum for Democratic Renewal; one Technical Constitutional Committee; a Consultative Council of Elders; three constitutional referenda and eight other national elections ; four heads of state and one president of a High Council of the Republic; four National Assemblies; nine prime ministers; at least one hundred and fifty ministers; one civilian coup d’état; two military coups d’état; one electoral boycott; one strike by the president and one strike by parliamentarians; one campaign of civil disobedience ; and one dissolution of the National Assembly. All this has taken place against a background of armed rebellions and communal and rural conflicts (Idrissa 2000). Niger’s unending experimentation over the decade of the 1990s has produced a wealth of empirical grist for the theoretical mills of political analysts who are concerned with the question of democracy in Africa.1 The country’s recent turbulent history of democratic experimentation suggests much, in terms of our thinking, of what the “democratic wave” has meant south of the Sahara. In many ways Niger has presented a puzzle to political analysts attempting to catalogue the effects of this democratic wave on the continent. In the mid-1990s, the country appeared to many to be among the successful cases of democratic transitions, and in the most comprehensive effort to date to explain the variations in African “democratic experiments,” Bratton and van de Walle classified it as such.2 The extraordinary political difficulties that marked the new regime from its inception, however, and its denouement with a coup in 1996, quickly led to the country being invoked instead as an example of the limitations of democracy in Africa, variously signaling to some scholars that it was the end of the democratic wave, and suggesting to others the corrective proof of the premature nature of earlier optimistic pronouncements about the inevitability—or even the possibility— of African democracy. And yet by the end of the decade the country surprisingly found itself once again debating and approving a democratic constitution, holding elections deemed largely “free and fair,” and inaugurating a new—this time the fifth—republic. This latest “transition,” however, is if anything even more puzzling and difficult to label. In many ways...

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