By Nina Agrawal
[…]
The U.S. has a long history of
attempting to influence presidential elections in other countries – it’s
done so as many as 81 times between 1946 and 2000, according to a database
amassed by political scientist Dov Levin of Carnegie Mellon University.
That number doesn’t
include military coups and regime change efforts following the election of
candidates the U.S. didn’t like, notably those in Iran, Guatemala and Chile.
Nor does it include general assistance with the electoral process, such as
election monitoring.
Levin
defines intervention as “a costly act which is designed to determine the
election results [in favor of] one of the two sides.” These acts, carried out
in secret two-thirds of the time, include funding the election campaigns
of specific parties, disseminating misinformation or propaganda, training
locals of only one side in various campaigning or get-out-the-vote
techniques, helping one side design their campaign materials, making public
pronouncements or threats in favor of or against a candidate, and providing or
withdrawing foreign aid.
In 59% of
these cases, the side that received assistance came to power,
although Levin estimates the average effect of “partisan electoral
interventions” to be only about a 3% increase in vote share.
The U.S. hasn’t been the only
one trying to interfere in other countries’ elections, according to
Levin’s data. Russia attempted to sway 36 foreign elections from the end
of
World War II to the turn of
the century – meaning that, in total, at least one of the two great powers
of the 20th century intervened in about 1 of every 9 competitive,
national-level executive elections in that time period.
Italy’s 1948 general election
is an early example of a race where U.S. actions probably influenced the
outcome.
“We threw everything,
including the kitchen sink” at helping the Christian Democrats beat the
Communists in Italy, said Levin, including covertly delivering “bags of money”
to cover campaign expenses, sending experts to help run the campaign,
subsidizing “pork” projects like land reclamation, and threatening publicly to
end U.S. aid to Italy if the Communists were elected.
Levin said that U.S.
intervention probably played an important role in preventing a Communist Party
victory, not just in 1948, but in seven subsequent Italian elections.
Throughout the Cold
War, U.S. involvement in foreign elections was mainly motivated by
the goal of containing communism, said Thomas Carothers, a foreign policy
expert at the Carnegie Endowment for International Peace. “The U.S. didn’t want
to see left-wing governments elected, and so it did engage fairly often in
trying to influence elections in other countries,” Carothers said.
This approach carried over
into the immediate post-Soviet period.
In the 1990 Nicaragua
elections, the CIA leaked damaging information on alleged corruption by
the Marxist Sandinistas to German newspapers, according to Levin. The
opposition used those reports against the Sandinista candidate,
Daniel Ortega. He lost to opposition
candidate Violeta Chamorro.
In Czechoslovakia that same
year, the U.S. provided training and campaign funding to Vaclav Havel’s party
and its Slovak affiliate as they planned for the country’s first
democratic election after its transition away from communism.
“The thinking was that we
wanted to make sure communism was dead and buried,” said Levin.
Even after that, the U.S.
continued trying to influence elections in its favor.
In Haiti after the 1986
overthrow of dictator and U.S. ally Jean-Claude “Baby Doc” Duvalier,
the CIA sought to support particular candidates and undermine Jean-Bertrande
Aristide, a Roman Catholic priest and proponent of liberation theology. The New
York Times reported in the 1990s that the CIA had on its
payroll members of the military junta that would ultimately unseat
Aristide after he was democratically elected in a landslide
over Marc Bazin, a former World Bank official and finance minister favored
by the U.S.
The U.S. also attempted to
sway Russian elections. In 1996, with the presidency of Boris Yeltsin and
the Russian economy flailing, President Clinton endorsed a $10.2-billion
loan from the International Monetary Fund linked to
privatization, trade liberalization and other measures that would move
Russia toward a capitalist economy. Yeltsin used the loan to bolster his
popular support, telling voters that only he had the reformist credentials to
secure such loans, according to media reports at the time. He used the
money, in part, for social spending before the election, including payment of
back wages and pensions.
In the Middle East, the
U.S. has aimed to bolster candidates who could further the
Israeli-Palestinian peace process. In 1996, seeking
to fulfill the legacy of assassinated Israeli Prime Minister Yitzhak Rabin
and the peace accords the U.S. brokered, Clinton openly supported Shimon
Peres, convening a peace summit in the Egyptian resort of Sharm el
Sheik to boost his popular support and inviting him to a meeting at
the White House a month before the election.
“We were persuaded that if [Likud candidate Benjamin] Netanyahu were elected, the peace
process would be closed for the season,” said Aaron David Miller, who worked at
the State Department at the time.
In 1999, in a more subtle
effort to sway the election, top Clinton strategists, including James Carville, were sent to advise Labor candidate Ehud Barak in the election against Netanyahu.
In Yugoslavia, the U.S. and
NATO had long sought to cut off Serbian nationalist and
Yugoslav leader Slobodan Milosevic from the international
system through economic sanctions and military action. In 2000, the
U.S. spent millions of dollars in aid for political parties, campaign costs and
independent media. Funding and broadcast equipment provided to the media arms
of the opposition were a decisive factor in electing opposition
candidate Vojislav Kostunica as Yugoslav president, according to Levin.
“If it wouldn’t have been for overt intervention … Milosevic would have been
very likely to have won another term,” he said.
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