Podcast #96: Timor-Leste’s parliamentary election

Ben is joined by former AEC official Michael Maley, who has just returned from a trip to Timor-Leste to help with the country’s recent parliamentary election. Ben and Michael discuss the constitutional structure, electoral system and party system of Timor-Leste. We also discuss the results of the recent elections, the likely shape of the new government, and the continuing dominance of the independence generation in Timorese politics.

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Credit to FelipeRev via Wikipedia for the map in the feature image.

The transcript is below the fold.

Ben: Welcome to the Tally Room podcast, I’m Ben Raue. In today’s episode we’ll be discussing the recent Timor-Leste parliamentary election which saw a swing towards the CNRT party of President José Ramos Horta and former president and prime minister and possible new prime minister Xanana Gusmão.

My guest today is Michael Maley. Michael had a 30 year career at the AEC, at different times running research it and international assistance areas. Michael in particular has expertise in helping run elections in other parts of the world giving advice and part of that has been visiting Timor-Leste on a number of occasions. Hello Michael.

Michael: Good morning.

Ben: So before we talk about this latest election and what’s happened this year with with Timor, tell me a little bit about your involvement in Timor-Leste because I’ve been reading in the last couple of days about the AEC’s long history of providing election advice overseas when you worked at the AEC, but what has you been your involvement in the development of ah Timor’s voting system over the last few decades?

Michael: Well, this all started back in about 1998 when it was becoming more apparent that there was a prospect of a political settlement in Timor. I had been working on international elections at the AEC for about 10 years and had done a lot of work with the UN.

And when a UN potential involvement with a vote became on the cards in early 1999, Australia was obviously going to be a key player because of our proximity to the country and the UN mission came here and basically said we’re going to need all the help we can get to pull this off in the amount of time that’s available to us.

The AEC for good and sound reasons didn’t want to have people on the ground in Timor at the time because we judged the situation was too dangerous, but as a side effect from that we did an enormous amount of work to support the preparations for the so-called popular consultation right through 1999.

After that because of my contacts with the UN I was asked to be an electoral commissioner for the 2001 constituent assembly election in Timor which was to take the country through from a transitional UNMIN administration to the restoration of independence.

So I had a few months up in Timor doing that work which was very interesting then after they had a political crisis in 2006-7 they asked the UN to certify the electoral process which was coming up then and I was again asked to be a member of the certification team for that. Ever since then I’ve been going back and forth to Timor either as an election observer or just as a visitor and I’ve just come back from my 44th trip there.

Ben: So that election for Timor-Leste’s parliament was held in May 2023 with the final results published earlier this month in early June and Michael you just got back from Timor last week.

Timor-Leste holds separate elections for the presidency with the last presidential election held in March-April 2022. The country has a semi-presidential system. So power is shared between a directly elected president and a prime minister who is at least in part responsible to parliament.

The last election saw an alliance led by Xanana Guzmao’s CNRT win a majority in parliament but efforts to form a government were hindered by President Guterres who is a member of Fretilin who’s kind of the other major party in Timor. Which eventually led to CNRT leaving the government and Fretilin entering the government, although a member of another party was the prime minister.

José Ramos-Horta, who is another member of CNRT then went on to win last year’s presidential election quite easily on the second round. His party has now gained 10 seats in the parliamentary election falling just short of a majority. Before we get into the details of what happened, Michael can we start by explaining the constitutional structure in Timor. How is power divided between the president and the parliament?

Michael: Sure. Well as you said it’s what’s often characterised as a semi-presidential system and just to unpack that for a second that means that you’re not talking about something like the model that the Australian Republican Movement has advocated for Australia where you would have a president essentially with no power exercising symbolic functions and accountable to the prime minister for day-to-day actions.

Nor is it the US model where the choice of the president determines which administration will be in power for the four years of his term. It is rather the case that the president has significant powers, but the day-to-day management of the government is still in the hands of the prime minister and the council of ministers.

In particular the president appoints the prime minister and that can be a matter of some significance because the pattern really since 2007 has been that no one party gets a majority so you find yourself in a situation where coalition building takes place and that’s often done after the election where an activist president can play quite a significant role by engaging in discussions with the various political players and nudging them in one direction or another. It’s worth making the point that the prime minister and ministers in Timor-Leste do not have to be MPs so it’s not a Westminster system in in that sense though they aren’t prevented from being mps either.

The president’s significant powers include the power to veto legislation and there is provision in the constitution for such a veto to be overwritten by parliament but in some cases that requires a special majority and in fact, that’s true in particular of legislation to affect the electoral process or the electoral system and this became an issue in the run-up to the recent election when the government was trying to legislate for various electoral changes. The legislation was vetoed by the president. The parliament sought to override it but didn’t get enough votes to do so so. So that’s a significant power.

The president can also refer legislation to the court of appeal for a ruling on its constitutionality before he actually makes a decision on whether to sign it or not. So. It’s a significant power that the president has and it’s also worth making the point that in a country like Timor-Leste power is not just source from the constitution. It’s also sourced from personal authority. José Ramos-Horta has not just authority from his office but also from the fact that he’s a highly respected international figure, Nobel prize winner, has been engaged in the country for a very long time and gets on well with everybody even though he has connections with some parties. He’s seen as a relatively nonpartisan and neutral figure in some ways and that’s been significant.

Ben: Looking at other semi-presidential systems, the president’s power can often be quite fluid depending on how much they can get along with the other parts of government, right, and whether they find themselves in an oppositional relationship or a friendly relationship where they can kind of exercise leadership as well, right?

I mean famously the French system: the president doesn’t in themselves have an enormous amount of power but elections are timed in such a way that they tend to win majority support in parliament and then they they become the leader of the party that’s in government and have enormous kind of extra-constitutional authority that comes from that. But if that doesn’t happen they could be quite powerless. But it sounds like in Timor, it’s a bit of both.

Michael: And I’d make the point on that: you have the interesting situation at the moment that the president is aligned with CNRT. Xanana Gusmão is the nominal leader of CNRT. Normally you would expect the president of a country who was from a party to be seen as the leader of that party but that’s not the case in Timor.

And more generally it’s worth noting that party leaders are not chosen or elected by their parliamentary caucuses or colleagues they’re chosen through the mechanisms of the party which goes back to really the fact that some of these parties had their origins before they were participating in democratic elections.

And one element of that is that the fact that you’ve lost an election doesn’t necessarily mean that you’re going to lose the party leadership and that’s an issue for example for Fretilin which has lost a series of elections now but it still has the same leadership it had back in 1999.

Ben: The voting system for Timor: they have 65 seats in parliament, it’s a uniicameral parliament and they are elected from a single national constituency. There’s no local electorates, no districts, using closed-list PR with a 4% threshold. So it’s nice and simple. You get a share of the national vote gets you a share of the seats if you get over 4% and they go down the list until you run out of seats.

What can you tell us about that system and and what impact that has? We talked briefly before we started recording, contrasting this with Papua New Guinea which we did some podcasts on last year which has a single member electorate system which produces remarkably different results when it comes to the party system.

Michael: The first thing to note is that there’s actually a constitutional requirement for a proportional representation system of some type to elect the national parliament, though it doesn’t go into detail as to how that will be done. They have a D’Hondt formula as you mentioned with a 4% threshold.

One of the most significant factors is is the use of closed-list PR. That is a system which provides absolutely minimal incentives for individual candidates to try to build a personal following. And some people see that as an issue, they say there’s no local representation, there’s party control. I think that you have to be careful what you wish for because building a personal following can be good if it’s done in the right way by working hard for your region, being an honest representative and so on.

But if the political culture is supportive of a different approach what you may well see is vote buying and rent seeking of the type that you see in Papua New Guinea. Which in its worst form involves MPs actually being given government money in the form of so-called constituency development funds which in effect is state-sponsored vote buying.

So Timor-Leste has been actually very fortunate with the system that it has in that it has created a party structure and a political system which is dominated by political parties but that has prevented politics from being fractured into the representation of a whole lot of small local interests at the expense of national interest.

And when a country has suffered major damage and destruction as was the case after the vote in 1999, you really need a national approach to a lot of the policy challenges which the country is facing. There’s no point in an MP being able to make sure that the 10 kilometres of road in his area are sealed if it deteriorates into a rotten road next door because the local MP there doesn’t have the same sorts of priorities. So there are significant benefits I think in having a strong and consolidated party system.

There are also very strong rules in Timor against floor crossing. Basically as an elected member of parliament if you break away from party discipline you lose your seat and it goes to the person who is next on the list. Just what party discipline might mean in those circumstances is one of a number of issues in the Timorese law and constitution that’s never had to be clarified by the courts but it’s there.

The threshold is the key, in that it basically has eliminated the representation in the parliament of a lot of parties with minimal support. With the need to get at least 4% nationwide that also tends to push towards parties which have the capacity to mobilise votes across the country rather than just in one particular area.

The other thing that’s notable is that the use of PR has meant that at no election since the restoration of independence has a single party gained a majority. And that’s meant the coalition governments have been the order of the day and this I think has been a very good thing because it’s discouraged polarisation. Because the the party you make as an enemy now may well be a party you need as a friend after the next election if you’re trying to put together a government. And in fact there’ve been all sorts of different coalitions including for quite a long time a de facto Fretilin-CNRT coalition in government.

So these things are pretty flexible in that way, but it has meant that you don’t have the sort of mess that you’ve got in America where people are polarized and and hate each other.

Ben: There are 5 parties in parliament now and all of them have some history. None of them appear to have come out of nowhere although some of them did run as part of a consolidated alliance last time.

To give you a sense of scale that’s kind of how many parties, and two of those parties are much bigger than the others. Those two parties are CNRT which stands for the National Congress for Timorese Reconstruction and Fretilin. Fretilin was the main party of the resistance to Indonesia during the period when Indonesia ruled Timor-Leste. Xanana Gusmão and José Ramos-Horta had been members I believe, but at some point they broke away after independence and formed CNRT which is the other rival party. Michael?

Michael: That’s true up to a point. There are in fact, the two big parties in CNRT and Fretilin. The party system in Timor has been relatively dynamic. There were 17 parties contesting the recent election. Only two of them had contested the 2001 constituent assembly election which was Fretilin and the Democratic Party (PD). CNRT didn’t exist at that point. But you mention the various different players and it’s worth making the point that Fretilin, CNRT, PD, the PLP and Ramos-Horta and Gusmão all had connections to the resistance to Indonesia in different ways.

Fretilin was the party structure which had declared initial independence unilaterally in 1975 so it’s been there for a long long time. Xanana Gusmao however was seen as the leader of the struggle and I mean seen within Timor he was the symbol when he was in prison in Indonesia of the struggle against the Indonesians as well.

And then you had Ramos-Horta who was the diplomatic front leader. The Democratic Party comes out of a student organisation called Renatil which was involved in resistance to the Indonesian rule. PLP is led by the former president and current prime minister Taur Matan Ruak who was head of the defence force and also was very much involved in the struggle for independence.

So a lot of the story of of party politics in Timor has been a fight over who owns history. And the interesting thing about the battle between Fretilin and CNRT is in effect they are two different entities both of which have this claim to history.

Fretilin I think resents this, they’ve constantly described themselves as the historic party which in some ways is a bit backward-looking. It’s almost as if in South Africa Nelsen Mandela instead of running for the ANC had decided to set up his own party and people would have had to decide who they were going to support.

Ben: Guzmao ran was linked to Fretilin at the beginning right?

Michael: Almost everyone has been leaked to Fretilin at one time or another.

Ben: There was a split pretty pretty early on in post-independence history, but they were in the same party at the beginning.

Michael: There was a rivalry that went back. At the 2002 presidential election Xanana, who won a massive vote 78% or thereabouts, didn’t actually want to be endorsed by any but party or but or wanted to be endorsed by all the parties. He wasn’t just running as a Fretilin person. So he had in effect detached himself from Fretilin even back then.

And you also had the fact that the leadership of Fretilin actually spent most of the time from 1975 to 1999 way out of Timor. They were not on the ground, they were in Portugal, they were in Mozambique, those sorts of places and some of them were relatively unknown to the people in Timor when they came back.

That’s that’s been an issue in the early days. So the fact that you’ve got all these historical focal points in different parties is quite a rare and distinctive feature of Timorese politics when you compare it with other party countries that have gone through liberation struggles.

Ben: One thing this made me think about as well is how much that independence generation, that generation that was kind of involved in Timorese politics in the 70s, still kind of dominates the the top ranks of Timorese politics today. I mean I’m not really across all the ministers, I’m sure there are some younger newer generation people coming through but Gusmão, Ramos-Horta, Mari Alkatiri who is the first prime minister who is still the leader of of Fretilin, are all kind of of that older generation.

It feels like there’ll be a moment at some point in the not to distant future where that generation moves on, but they’re still kind of holding on to a lot of those leadership roles.

Michael: Yes, and that’s a real issue in the country because there’s a massive demographic bulge has been coming through. Families in Timor were always large and a lot of kids got born in the in the immediate aftermath of independence.

There are plenty of people voting now who have no memory of the country under occupation by Indonesia. So appeal to history has a declining value from a political point of view. For example to these bright young voters who want to know about the future of the country not about its past.

So there’s a lot of debate going on within Fretilin, and there has been for several years now about generational change, but the old guard is hanging on fiercely. And in a way their fierceness of hanging on is getting stronger as there’s less and less to hang on to as their vote is going down.

That’s one of the interesting dynamics at the moment is whether the younger reformers in some of these parties are going to see a future for themselves in the party, or whether they’re just going to say this is something that’s going away and and we might as well cut out on our own.

They were fairly close to talking a couple of weeks ago about expelling from Fretilin some of the younger reformers. That seems to have been dropped but it’s an indication of the intergenerational conflicts that are going on in some of these parties, and also seen in the broader community.

Ben: Well, it’s interesting I was just looking at lists of presidents and prime ministers of Timor and they’re almost entirely born between about 1946 and 1956 which means they were twenty to thirty years old when independence was first declared. They were 45 to 55 years old when Timor gained independence from Indonesia. But we’ve had 20 years of politics since then and they’re all still kind of in their dominant role. So, It’s very interesting.

Michael: There are really two trends that are developing in Timor and have been over the last twenty or so years. One is independence obviously which has radically changed the nature of the country, but the other is globalisation.

From a country that was totally isolated from the world for a very long time. All of a sudden it’s connected and all of a sudden particularly the younger generation are seizing onto social media. There’s close to half a million Facebook accounts in Timor. Almost everybody has a smart phone of one description or another, and this is actually tying in with with a country where a connection with other people has always been a very important part of life anyway, but its turbo-charged it with with the younger generation.

So, you know younger people see not just what’s happening in their village, but what’s happening in the wider world. That’s a significant influence on their sense of when there should be some generational change in Timor poliitcs.

Ben: Okay, so we’ve talked a little bit about Fretilin and CNRT, can we run through the other three parties that are in the parliament now? The Democratic Party, you briefly mentioned them.

Michael: Sure yeah they had their origins in Renatil. A couple of interesting things about them. Their vote has been actually pretty stable, around about a bit less than 10 percent ever since they were set up and they’d been a constant feature of the politics since 2001 ah, they’re not going away. They’re not getting very much bigger either. But they have a ah pretty solid base there.

Another interesting thing about them is that they survived the death of their most prominent leader back in 2015. A guy known by the nom de guerre of Lasama who was the president of the parliament at one point, and died of a stroke.

Often in these sorts of situations if parties are built around personalities as is often the case in Timor, if the personality is no longer around the party loses its impact but that hasn’t happened with PD, they’ve kept their vote up. They’ve got some relatively young and some very bright members of the parliament as well.

Ben: And then we have, ah it’s spelt as an acronym KHUNTO. So what’s their story?

Michael: KHUNTO had its origins in the martial arts groups in the country which have been a phenomenon that’s around for a long long time going back to Indonesian times where they also have these things.

But there are networks of martial arts groups in considerable um level of conflict with each other from time to time but they decided to go political and KHUNTO has been the mechanism by which they’ve done that and because they’ve got significant membership across the country that gave KHUNTO a base to start on.

Ben: And then we have the PLP, People’s Liberation Party, who is led by the current prime minister, maybe possibly you could argue the outgoing prime minister. What’s their story?

Michael: Well, they were set up essentially as a mechanism, a vehicle for Taur Matan Ruak back in the time when he was president from 2012 to 2017 but was looking to get more directly involved in day-to-day politics.

Having said that there were also people involved with the establishment of PLP who had a slightly different vision for it as a party, perhaps more programmatic than some of the other parties, a bit younger perhaps more focused on the future.

In a way that didn’t work out quite so well because they’ve been caught up in the politics of the popularity or lack thereof of the current government. And they’ve paid the price for that in terms of the vote they’ve got. They certainly haven’t been able to break out into becoming a major party. There have been some good people in PLP, how long they’ll stay I don’t know.

Ben: I’ve got 2 questions about the 2018 election. One is it was only one year after the 2017 election. Not sure what that was about. But also CNRT, Gusmão’s party, ran on a ticket with PLP and KHUNTO running together winning a majority. What’s the story about why they ran as that group?

Michael: There’s there’s a provision in the constitution which has been much disputed since 2007 which says that the president shall appoint as the prime minister someone from the party with the most votes or the coalition with the most votes in parliament.

And after the 2007 election Fretilin had lost its majority in the parliament but they still had the greatest number of votes of any party. They asserted that the constitutional requirement was that they be given the first opportunity to form the government.

But parties opposed to them had already come together and indicated that they would work together to get a working majority in the parliament. So Ramas-Horta actually commissioned the opposition parties rather than Fretilin to form the government and Fretilin was was very miffed about that and spent several years referring to the ‘de facto government’ rather than the real government. On the other hand Fretilin never took it to court to test. Um the meaning of that constitutional provision.

This is yet another area where there’s there’s vagueness, so practices now really take this more in the direction of identifying as the government whoever is going to be the parliamentary majority.

We saw a rather unstable situation after the 2017 election where Fretilin, with this time a Fretilin president in in the incumbent position, was asserting the right to form a government but it wasn’t really able to put together a majority. And so things stumbled along for a few months until ultimately there was an early election called in 2018.

And to avoid the risk of being caught in by this constitutional provision the three parties that had decided to work together actually formed a common list which was called the AMP list and they shared up the seats between them on the list. So there was no doubt after the 2018 election that that was the entity that had got the most votes. That solved the argument.

After then the president exercising what he said were his powers refused to sign in a number of the ministers nominated by CNRT on various grounds and that became a big dispute as well. But interestingly the AMP agreement had led to the leader not of CNRT but of PLP Taur Matan Ruak becoming the prime minister and he made it fairly clear by his actions that he wasn’t really interested in this fight about the CNRT ministers, he wasn’t going to pursue it.

Eventually CNRT got to the point where they pulled out of the coalition thinking I suspect that that would lead to the collapse of the government and another election. But instead the government was reconstituted and Fretilin was brought in which was what got us to the current state of affairs. So you you have this sort of ongoing complexity associated with coalition formation and interaction with some of these constitutional provisions.

Ben: Let me ask about the geography of Timor. Looking at the 2023 parliamentary election page on Wikipedia, it’s actually got a little map showing what looks like further to the east Fretilin does a bit better. Further to the west including particularly in Dili, CNRT is stronger but I’m sure that’s missing a bit of complexity there. But what are the the general geographical trends including for the smaller parties about where they’re stronger and where they’re weaker?

Michael: Well, that’s very true. There is a lot of variation in in those sorts of things and Fretilin has historically had its strongholds in the east in Baucau, Lospalos and Viqueque, the three eastern municipalities. CNRT is more widely spread. Xanana’s home district is Manatuto which is just to the east of Dili and that’s where CNRT polls strongest.

But you have tended to find for example that a party may have its base in the mountains, it may have its base down by the coast. Particularly the smaller parties, they tend to be localised with the support base around the area where their leaders come from, or the people who’ve sponsored them come from.

So yeah, there is quite a bit of regional variation. Having said that you still see swings which are pretty much nationwide which is somewhat like Australia. Fretilin lost votes everywhere at this election even though their vote held up better in the east than in other parts of the country. But voters have been prepared to swing too.

One of the things I think that was a great shock to Fretilin in 2007 was that their vote went from 57% in 2001 to 29%. This is nationwide. That’s a 28% swing against them which is a massive swing as we know.

And particularly massive when you look at the performance of liberation movements in other countries like South Africa like Mozambique like Angola where basically the party that was elected at the time of independence has powered on into the future almost untouched. In a way that points to an approach to politics on the part of the voters in Timor which is much more like what you find in Indonesia where if a government is put in and has not seen to be performing it’s pitched out rather unceremoniously has happened to Megawati Sukarnoputri.

So there is a lot of regional variation but it also varies a lot from election to election. Just at this election there was a 12.6% swing to CNRT since the the last time they contested an election on their own in 2017. There was a swing against Fretilin since 2018 of 8.41%. These are big swings when you compare it with, say, an Australian election. They’re massive swings.

Ben: It kind of makes sense when you think a little bit about the demographics of the country being relatively young. Young people maybe don’t have as much of an allegiance but also, if you’re an older person in Timor, it’s not like you’ve been voting for a party for 50 years right. The party system just hasn’t existed that long.

That 2007 result, like some quite prominent figures from independents who before that point had been vaguely affiliated with Fretilin even if they weren’t kind of on board with the party’s leadership, had gone off and formed an alternative party. Like that metaphor that you raised about if Nelson Mandela had gone off and formed an alternative party to the ANC I suspect it would have seen something similar in South Africa. That didn’t happen there and so it didn’t happen. But it kind of makes sense.

You think about the youthfulness, you would expect a bit more fluidity in terms of how people vote. And because the mantle of credibility from the resistance is not monopolized by one party, but it’s shared around means you don’t have that kind of, well, we’re going to keep voting for the people who gave us independence..

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Michael: Exactly and I mean it’s a generational thing now a fretlin has been around for a long time. It’s been around since since the 1970 s so for a lot of Fretlin supporters. It’s not just a matter of voting for a political party. It’s part of their identity.

You know it’s it’s it’s like being a member of the church and you don’t necessarily abandon your faith because a particular priest hasn’t done a good job or something like that or you don’t like the current pope. There’s something deeper in it than that and going to.
Ah, Belief in Fretilin was what sustained a lot of people during some truly awful times and those stories do get passed down from generation to generation. So you know there is a depth of commitment there particularly in the Fretilin base and the chain and.

The changes there I suspect are going to be as people just get older because the the people who have those memories going back to to the 1970 s are are the older people and and they are rapidly becoming outnumbered by this sort of demographic tsunami. Um.

That is is hit now you know there are lots of people voting now who who don’t have a memory of Indonesia occupying the country but it’s very significant.

Ben: Um, is it just is it just that more people are being born or was it also that after Independence there was a baby boom.

Michael: It’s a mixed story because in some cases family sizes are now getting smaller, but the family sizes are still big and they’re coming through and that’s basically the story.

The other thing that’s worth noting, particularly when you compare Timor with South Africa: there are very few visual reminders of the Indonesian occupation. It’s not like South Africa where you can fly over Johannesburg and you can see the black townships in Soweto still there full of poor people and the rich areas. Or you go to Zimbabwe and you see the big farms owned by the farmers and that sort of thing.

There is really very little of that in Timor now to remind people. Even the burnt buildings which you’d remember from Dili 1999 have largely been replaced. You’re more struck when you go there now by the new buildings than by the damaged ones.

And so those reminders are not there on a day-to-day basis in the way that they are in in some of the other countries. And a lot of Australians find this hard to believe, that there is very little anti-Indonesian sentiment in Timor. There’s still a lot of resentment against the Indonesian military but that doesn’t carry forward to individual Indonesians, a number of whom I know are living in Dili very happily.

And it also doesn’t really carry through to their foreign relations, because they have an excellent relationship with Indonesia now. Indonesia is encouraging Timor to join ASEAN. I was down at the border not so long ago and I saw some Indonesian soldiers on motorbikes and they were making a bit of money on the side by transferring people on the bikes from one border post to another and it didn’t cause any excitement at all.

I think the Timorese also realise Indonesia is now a different country. It went through a transition at about the same time that they did. There’s still a lot of influence in Indonesian factors, even in the electoral process. The way that votes are marked and counted is taken from Indonesian elections.

Ben: All right, so we’ve got all the background. Let’s talk briefly about the 2022 presidential election and then we’ll get to 2023. President Guterres who was running for re-election. There’s a 2 round system kind of French style thing where the top 2 candidates go through. José Ramos-Horta who was a former president and a former prime minister came back to run again. Um, he had a substantial lead in the first round and then won quite comfortably 62 to 38 in the second round.

Michael: It’s worth bearing in mind that when the former president who goes by the nom de guerre of Lú-Olo was elected in 2017 that was actually with the support of CNRT. He went through as a national candidate so he polled really quite comfortably in in 2017. In 2022 his vote went down to 22% in the first round, which is pretty low for an incumbent president. Ramos-Horta got 46% and there were a whole swag of other candidates including independents who weren’t really relevant to the contest.

Except perhaps one, the former head of the defence force General Lere Anan Timur who ran for the presidency, got about 6% of the vote and then he subsequently rejoined Fretilin and he was on the Fretilin candidate list for the current parliamentary election.

So there was a runoff and then Ramos-Horta won the runoff very comfortably and again it it indicated the extent to which there was a vote for change. Lú-Olo was not a charismatic figure and was not a very popular figure in some ways and and so nobody was terribly surprised when he lost last year.

Ben: And then we get to 2023. So CNRT have won 31 out of 65 seats so they’re two short of a majority. They had 21 before the election and there had been 34 for the previous joint list at the last election. Most of those gains came at the expense of Fretilin and the PLP who each lost 4 seats and a couple of other small parties lost a single seat. What’s happened here?

Michael: Basically you had a government that were not very popular, and there was a swing to the opposition, and it was a big swing. But that just indicates the extent to which the voters in Timor actually are very switched on and understand that the act of voting is a form of exercise of power on their part. And that’s one of the striking things about Timorese elections is that you have had big swings over a long history.

Almost every election night some party has either dropped a long way or come up a long way and that that really does indicate the extent to which the voters are committed to using their power quite ruthlessly and if they don’t like a government they will dispose of it without much compunction, and this is basically what we saw happening here.

I think there are lessons that really need to be drawn by Fretilin in particular. Because to me the big story of this election again is the way in which Fretilin’s vote has just gone down and down and down. They got their lowest vote ever at at a national election this time which is quite remarkable for a party that got 57% of the vote in 2001.

Ben: This alliance that ran in 2018 won a clear majority. That alliance, about two-thirds of its membership in parliament was CNRT, or certainly a majority was.

So if you’re voting for that alliance you would have expected to see CNRT in government. Ruak became prime minister but there was I think probably was an expectation that CNRT would be part of that government before the intervention of the president in kind of diverting the path of government in a different direction.

And it looks like you know the voters have punished the parties that benefited from that diversion. The prime minister’s party PLP is now down to quite a small number of seats,, less than 10% of seats in parliament now.

It seems clear like, when people people feel like they vote for a government and then don’t get it, I think generally that’s not going to turn out particularly well for the people who do get into government in that kind of situation.

Michael: Well that’s undoubtedly would have been a factor for some voters but one doesn’t really know who or or how many. It really is is significant. Fretilin really to me is like Kodak. They believed that their brand was eternal and it’s turned out not to be and and it’s not entirely clear which way they go from here.

They seem to have eschewed generational renewal, and whether they will now do that or whether they will simply say we’re going to hang on to what we’ve got in terms of power within the party is is a big question but certainly they’re not on a positive trajectory at the moment.

Ben: So what happens with the coalition formation now? Because CNRT have the presidency, they have the largest number of seats, not quite a majority but they’re almost there. Is it a fait accompli that we have a mostly CNRT government led by Gusmão?

Michael: Well, what’s happened at the moment is that it’s been announced that CNRT and the Democratic Party will form a coalition. And one significant aspect of the current election: the CNRT got sufficiently close to a majority that they would have been able to form a coalition with any one party of the other parties represented in the parliament.

Whereas a coalition in opposition to CNRT would have had to gather together all of those other parties in in a coalition. That was not feasible.

I think Ramos-Horta made it pretty clear from the outset that he was keen to see a PD-CNRT coalition, and that he was keen also to see a stable coalition which is more likely when you have just two parties rather than a whole swag of different parties.

So that’s in the pipeline and the argument that will be going on now is about who gets what ministries but there will be a CNRT-PD government and and I think it’s it’s accepted that Xanana Gusmão will be the PM again.

Ben: And I guess that’s as close to pure single party government that we’ve seen in Timor since before the split in Fretilin right? Since 2002 this would be the closest we get to that.

Michael: Yeah, except that being close is not enough because you’re always at the mercy of the risk that you will lose your majority if you offend your coalition partners and where will that then go.

Now whether in such a scenario, which I don’t particularly expect, a president like Ramos-Horta would say I’ll allow a coalition of the other parties to take power or whether he’d be looking at trying to get to a fresh election is one of those interesting questions and it would depend rather on where you were in the the term of the parliament, I suspect. But this is another area where who was president of the Republic actually matters quite a lot.

There are quite a few interesting issues. One is that the election was actually very well conducted, and that’s worth knowing about because the electoral administration there goes back to 2001 and there’s a depth of experience in their staff which is quite something. The director general of the technical secretariat for election administration which is known by the acronym of STAE has been in elections longer than the electoral commissioner in the AEC.

You see, the political culture of support for the election process is really significant. There was a big turnout, the turnout was nearly eighty percent with non-compulsory voting. The turnout was greater among women than among men which replicated a pattern at previous elections.

The younger electorate, I think, is also significant in that it’s it’s much more tolerant of political differences and you you see among young people very good friends who are in different parties. There are situations where members of families are prominent players in different parties. And that’s no longer destructive of family relationships as it may have been twenty years ago.

There’s a lot of respect for diversity of political opinion in Timor and the elections go beautifully smoothly on the day. The counting is extremely transparent. They literally hold up every ballot and show it to all the scrutineers so that they can see that it’s been correctly sorted and it’s a simple process. They don’t have electronic voting or anything like that.

So the scope for distrust in the process is very limited. You don’t hear this sort of stop-the-steal nonsense that you’re hearing in America these days. I actually have more confidence that Timor is going to be a democracy in twenty years time than the USA.

So it’s a very positive story that we’re looking at in Timor at the moment. Their democracy is getting rated by people like the Economist and the Electoral Integrity Project as the strongest in Southeast Asia. And it’s the quality of their elections that is pulling those ratings up. At the current election there were no disputes taken to the court of appeal. Nobody tried to challenge the results. Where there’s been arguments they’ve usually been in government formation after the election rather than at election time itself. So, it was a very positive manifestation of of what’s becoming a really good little democracy in in our part of the world.

Ben: Well, it seems like a good news story if you’re someone who you know follows Australian politics but hasn’t paid attention as much to Timor for a while. You know once upon a time it was quite a major issue discussed a lot in Australian news and it hasn’t been for a while and it’s good to hear that generally its democratic institutions are going strong.

So that’s about it for this episode of the Tally Room podcast. Thank you Michael for joining me.

Michael: Thanks for having me.

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