After Fiji’s Election: From One Coup Leader to Another

Fiji’s December election initially produced an unclear result, with both the FijiFirst Party of Prime Minister Frank Bainimarama and the alliance between the People’s Alliance Party (PAP) and the National Federation Party (NFP) winning 26 seats each. After several days of negotiations with the Social Democratic Liberal Party (SODELPA) – which despite its collapse in support ironically became the Parliament’s kingmaker – a coalition was formed between the PAP, NFP, and SODELPA.

This coalition means that Fiji will have its first new prime minister in the 16 years following the 2006 coup by Bainimarama, then the army chief. After the restoration of democracy in 2014, Bainimarama and his FijiFirst party clinched two consecutive election victories. The new prime minister will be PAP’s leader Sitiveni Rabuka, returning to the role he held from 1992-1999, after the coups he led in 1987 (two, several months apart).

The replacement of one prime minister responsible for two coups (2000 and 2006 for Bainimarama) with another is an indication of the complexity of Fijian politics, as well as the outsized role that the military plays in the country's affairs.

Rabuka’s personal popularity can be seen as the primary reason why the PAP performed so well in this election. Previously Rabuka was the leader of SODELPA and leader of the opposition in the Parliament. However, after being ousted from the SODELPA leadership in 2020, Rabuka formed the PAP – and took most of SODELPA’s support with him.

Rabuka launched his coups in the late 1980s in order to assert indigenous Fijian, or iTaukei, dominance in a country that at the time had become around 50 percent Indo-Fijian. During his time in power, he oversaw a rewrite of the constitution to provide special privileges for iTaukei. However, since then Rabuka has matured and come to accept the need for more equitable governing structures. This looks to have been the reason for his ouster from the SODELPA leadership, with the party seeking to continue promoting policies that would advance iTaukei privileges.

This remains the permanent tension in Fijian politics. Bainimarama’s 2013 Constitution sought to make ethnicity irrelevant in the country’s political structures. The new constitution removed the race-based electoral rolls and ethnic seat quotas that Rabuka had established, while also abolishing the Parliament’s unelected upper house and the powerful Great Council of Chiefs – all of which were designed to privilege iTaukei over Indo-Fijians.

Recent migration trends should have assuaged iTaukei nationalists’ fears of losing their traditional social dominance. Although ethnic data from the 2017 Census remains suppressed due to the government’s concern that it may inflame tensions, it is estimated that around 100,000 Indo-Fijians have emigrated since the late 1980s, dropping their percentage of the population to somewhere in the mid-30s.

As kingmaker following the election, SODELPA took into its coalition negotiations a series of demands that were centered around iTaukei interests, including reinstating the Great Council of Chiefs, the promotion of iTaukei land and economic concerns, control of the Ministry of iTaukei Affairs, and a commitment to establishing a Fijian embassy in Jerusalem – with a previous demand to declare Fiji a Christian state being taken off the table. Although the announcement of the coalition didn’t outline what demands that the PAP and NFP had accepted, the NFP is a predominantly Indo-Fijian party. They would have a keen interest in not accepting too many SODELPA demands that could damage their support in the Indo-Fijian community.

For FijiFirst – and in particular for such an outsized and dominant figure as Bainimarama – there will be the shock of losing office after its attempts to reshape the country in a more post-ethnic direction. Although their aims might have been laudable, their tactics were often anything but. The FijiFirst party created punitive media laws that restricted freedom of the press, placed pressure on the judiciary to produce outcomes it favored, and had been accused of nepotism and patronage, while also having a habit of being unnecessarily vindictive toward political opponents.

Due to these authoritarian instincts, FijiFirst initially refused to concede the election, and instead forced the new coalition to test their support on the parliament floor. A brief session of parliament was organized to provide this opportunity, and although one of SODELPA’s three MPs voted against the formation of the new government, the new coalition had the numbers. Positively, Bainimarama acquiesced to the peaceful transfer of power, although, needing the last word, he claimed that this was the legacy of his 2013 Constitution.