Luis Abinader Reelected in the Dominican Republic

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We welcome you to the Greater Caribbean Monitor (GCaM). In this issue, you will find:

•Luis Abinader Reelected in the Dominican Republic

•The Argentina-Spain Diplomatic Crisis Continues

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•Luis Abinader Reelected in the Dominican Republic
655 words | 3 minutes reading time

Dominican President Luis Abinader (PRM, center) won his reelection bid last Sunday, managing to secure 57.45% of the vote. His main opponents, Abel Martínez (PLD, center-left) and former president Leonel Fernández (FP, center-left), finished the evening with 10.39% and 28.85%, respectively.

• Polls predicted a comfortable victory for Abinader, whose party won the country’s largest cities in February’s local elections.

• On this occasion, the governing PRM has also secured comfortable majorities in Congress, taking 29 of the Senate’s 32 seats and 140 of the Chamber of Deputies’ 190 seats. 

• Neither Martínez nor three-time president Fernández can expect an improvement in their fortunes, but they have insisted that they will remain in politics. Fernández will take solace in the fact that his son and political heir, Omar, will be sworn in as senator on August 16. 

Panorama. In a region given to discarding its incumbents, Dominicans tend to bet on continuity; indeed, the country has reelected its last three presidents. Abinader’s victory is unsurprising, with GDP growth slated to hit 5.1% this year. As The Economist said last week, “technocratic, market-friendly centrism” prevails in the country.  

• Abinader, a hotelier, rose to the presidency as a champion of anti-corruption efforts. He granted the Attorney General’s Office greater powers, which have since been deployed against members of the previous government. 

• In 2022, he enacted the Asset Forfeiture Law, allowing the confiscation of assets tied to corruption. These immensely popular policies were joined by Abinader’s skillful handling of the pandemic and post-COVID inflation. 

• Like all Dominican governments—the country’s development model is a deeply seated consensus—Abinader encouraged tourism. Deeming world-famous Punta Cana a saturated market, he promised to invest $1.3 billion in Pedernales, located in the country’s traditionally poorer south.

Immigration. The Dominican economy is stealing a march on its Latin American neighbors; what’s more, in the populace’s eyes, the specter of corruption shows signs of receding. These two factors would likely have sufficed to secure Abinader’s election, but the president benefited from the crisis in neighboring Haiti, where the state has all but imploded and criminal gangs control 80% of the capital, Port-au-Prince.

• The collapse of the neighboring country allowed Abinader, a technocrat not given to bombastic talk, to emerge as a patriot opposed to illegal Haitian immigration, a perennial concern for Dominicans.

• The Dominican Republic, one should recall, is one of the few countries in the Americas without absolute jus soli, or birthright citizenship. In 2013, the Constitutional Court ruled that the children of undocumented immigrants, the vast majority of them Haitian, are not Dominican nationals.

• Abinader has gone so far as to close borders in the face of Haitian provocations, greatly pleasing the Dominican electorate. He refused to grant shelter to Ariel Henry, Haiti’s ill-fated prime minister, when Haitian gangs kept him from landing in Port-au-Prince. Henry would end up in Puerto Rico.

Future. The Constitution bars Abinader from running for another term; although Dominican presidents have a habit of amending it to run for reelection, he appears sincere in his wish to leave office by 2028. Abinader is well on track to enshrine his party, the PRM, as a hegemonic force in Dominican politics. This would not be unusual: the previous ruling party, the PLD, held on to power for 16 years.

• Dominicans are satisfied with the government’s handling of their top priorities: the economy, Haitian immigration, and corruption. Crime still bothers them, however; official data showing a 30.2% decrease in homicides does not appear to grant them comfort.

• The government’s most immediate challenge is tax reform, which will undoubtedly prove unpopular. Abinader, an unusually candid politician, has previously said that the deficit, which hovers around 3-5%, is unsustainable.

• Challenges abound. Losses in the national power grid have led to a rise in debt. Abortion, which is banned, will resurface as a politically salient topic. With the PLD now squarely defeated, the next corruption scandals may affect Abinader’s party. Until now at least, the president has sailed the ship of state with remarkable dexterity; the next four years will prove his mettle.

•The Argentina-Spain Diplomatic Crisis Continues
651 words | 3 minutes reading time

Javier Milei and Pedro Sánchez, Spain’s prime minister, detest each other, giving rise to a pantomime of a diplomatic crisis. It began when Óscar Puente, the Spanish transport minister, accused the Argentine president of being a drug addict fond of “ingesting substances.”

• Buenos Aires did not not sit idly by. Milei’s spokesman, the combative Manuel Adorni, called on the Spanish government to issue an apology, which was not forthcoming. Milei had an ace up his sleeve: a private trip to Spain as a guest of Vox, the most conservative of Spain’s mainstream parties. 

• Vox summoned the main figures of the European right to a massive rally at the Vistalegre Palace in Madrid. Milei flattered Vox’s leader, saying, “When I was a despicable being [that is, a political outsider], only Santiago Abascal embraced me.” 

• Milei, erratic and comical—perhaps he owes his success to this—did not hold back; he called Begoña Gómez, Prime Minister Sánchez’s wife, “corrupt.” Madrid responded by recalling its ambassador in Buenos Aires, María Jesús Alonso, subsequently saying the move was permanent. 

Between the Lines. This would appear to be a typical, albeit picturesque, diplomatic crisis between two states. Both hold themselves to be the aggrieved party, hence their insistence on saving face and procuring an apology from the other side. This conceals the reality of the dispute, which is not national, much less diplomatic, but very personal.

• Proof of this is Vox’s attitude. The most right-wing of Spain’s parties is firmly in Milei’s camp, with its politicians insisting that the Argentine president has been far “too polite” in his response to the ruling Spanish Socialist Party.

• If it were truly an “affront to the fatherland,” Vox’s Spanish patriotism would have forced a rift with Milei, but Vox is well-aware that it faces an ideological war in which it is closer to Milei, an ally, than to its greatest domestic enemy, Sánchez’s Socialist Party.

• Buenos Aires has interpreted the affair in the same manner. At the Vox rally, Milei spoke of socialism as “cancerous”, subsequently referring to Sánchez as an “arrogant socialist.” The Spanish foreign minister was outraged, saying it was inconceivable for a foreign leader to insult a head of government in his own country.

Facts. Hispano-Argentine relations are not in real trouble. Abundant trade and investment volumes between the two, both emerging as a consequence of undeniable cultural ties, will remain. In fact, once the diplomatic crisis boils over and “ages out” of the media cycle, normality will likely return. 

• Sánchez has left Buenos Aires without a Spanish ambassador due to essentially domestic considerations. In his eyes, Milei’s greatest sin was to mention Sánchez’s wife, Begoña Gómez, currently under investigation for influence peddling. 

• Spanish prosecutors made the case public late last month. Displeased, Sánchez published an open letter and went on a sort of five-day spiritual retreat, where he said he would weigh whether or not to remain in office. He soon returned to front-line politics, insisting his party had begged him to stay on as prime minister.

• Cynical analysts suggest Sánchez manufactured the situation to cast himself as uninterested in power and protective of his wife. Be that as it may, Sánchez cannot accept, at least for the time being, any accusation against his wife, much less from a foreign leader.

The Balance. Ibero-American diplomacy has been unusually active in recent months. This Hispano-Argentina skirmish of sorts is not of the same caliber as the region’s disputes over Palestine or the embassy incident between Ecuador and Mexico. Even so, it does not lack noteworthy elements.

• In broad strokes, the Spanish-speaking world increasingly has a more cosmopolitan politics. Divisions are more ideological than national, hence the bizarre, or perhaps entirely natural, intercontinental alliance between Milei and Vox.

• Sympathies among world leaders are hardly earth-shattering news. They have always existed. What is noteworthy is that it is finally happening within the Spanish-speaking right; cooperation used to be limited to the left, organized around clubs like the São Paulo Forum and the Puebla Group.