In every election in Haiti, there is a little something extra that gives the winner a boost. This is not about our own manipulations to favor X or Y, nor about blatant foreign interference.

The boost in the country’s first truly democratic elections was Jean-Bertrand Aristide’s use of Creole in 1990, in a country that had only just, with the 1987 Constitution, recognized as an official language the one spoken by everyone. At the time, the other candidates expressed themselves mainly in French.