Haitian president’s pick for prime minister rejected

PORT-AU-PRINCE — The Haitian parliament rejected the nomination of Daniel-Gerard Rouzier to serve as prime minister, in a blow to new President Michel Martelly.

More than a month after Martelly took up the reins of power in the quake-hit Caribbean nation, Haiti still lacks a legitimate government, after prime minister Jean-Max Bellerive and his cabinet resigned.

Forty-two deputies voted against Rouzier’s nomination, most of them members of former president Rene Preval’s Unity Party, while 19 deputies voted for him and three abstained.

“We will write to the president to let him know the Chamber of Deputies has rejected Daniel-Gerard Rouzier’s nomination as prime minister, and ask him to nominate a new prime minister,” said speaker Saurel Jacinthe.

In debates before the vote, several deputies expressed concern that Rouzier was a businessman, pointing to a possible conflict of interest if he became prime minister.

Rouzier, who is close to Martelly, studied in the United States and has a masters degree in accounting, founded E-Power, a company that supplies many Haitians with electricity and holds government contracts.

Critics had also hammered him for being the honorary counsel general of Jamaica, a post that had functions, some lawmakers argued, that were incompatible with him becoming prime minister.

Rouzier, a married father of three who has written two books, “The Power of Ideas” (2002) and “To Believe, Love and Hope” (2006), is described in his biography as an avid book and art collector, especially on Haitian subjects.

As he was sworn in as president in May, Martelly vowed to “change Haiti,” promising to restore order and confidence in a country struggling to emerge from one of the most destructive earthquakes of modern times.

Much of the capital was leveled in a magnitude 7.0 quake in January 2010 that killed more than 225,000 people and left one in seven Haitians homeless, a devastating disaster for a country that was already the poorest in the Americas.

Seventeen months on, the pace of reconstruction is painfully slow for hundreds of thousands of traumatized survivors who lost everything and are forced to subsist in squalid tent cities around the still-ruined capital.

Observers had predicted that Martelly would face an uphill struggle to form a government and navigate the often treacherous currents of Haitian politics.

He has just three members of his own fledgling Repons Peyizan party to work with in parliament as he looks to forge deals with Unity, Preval’s ruling party that firmed its grip on power in the legislative elections.

First-round presidential election results led to deadly riots in December after Martelly was said to have finished third and out of the race. An outcry led by the United States ushered in a team of international monitors who found massive fraud in favor of the ruling party candidate.

Preval’s handpicked protege Jude Celestin was eliminated from the race in February and Martelly was reinstated to compete in a long-delayed run-off against former first lady Mirlande Manigat.