February 8, 2021 – February 8, 2026: Five Years After the Farce, Haiti Still Captive to Its Political Impostures

February 8, 2021 marks one of the most degrading moments of the recent Haitian political crisis. After several openly destabilizing movements directed against constitutional president Jovenel Moïse, and following the aborted Petit-Bois coup d'état, a group presenting itself as the democratic and popular sector (SDP) arrogated to itself the right to proclaim judge and professor Mécène Jean-Louis “President of the Republic”.

It was neither a revolutionary act nor a democratic resurgence. It was a hollow political operation, an improvised scenography intended to create the illusion of power. A striking demonstration of the willful disregard for constitutional law and the assumed contempt for institutions. The Republic was not overthrown that day; it was ridiculed.

The episode, however, caused real damage. A career magistrate was exposed, instrumentalized, then abandoned. Mécène Jean-Louis never exercised the power attributed to him, but he paid the high price for the irresponsibility of those who used him as a temporary symbol. This affair reveals a deeply rooted practice: in the Haitian political arena, individuals are consumed, then discarded.

This February 8 also acted as a brutal revealer. Behind the moralizing speeches and democratic proclamations, a part of the political class showed its intellectual indigence, its lack of a state project, and its propensity to confuse agitation with legitimacy. Politics was reduced to permanent gesticulation, disconnected from any institutional requirement.

Five years later, the assessment is severe. Nothing has changed, or almost nothing. The same reflexes dominate: improvisation, verbal radicalism, contempt for the legal framework. The crisis has deepened, violence has taken hold, the State has faded away. We continue to move forward without a compass, normalizing failure and transforming the exception into the rule.

Haiti, the first Black Republic, proclaimed mother of liberty, finds itself today a prisoner of its own renunciations. It is neither the lack of discourse nor the absence of slogans that is missing, but political courage, intellectual rigor, and a sense of historical responsibility.

Recovery will come neither from symbolic proclamations nor from imaginary presidencies. It requires strict adherence to the Constitution, an end to the instrumentalization of institutions, accountability for political actors, and the reconstruction of a public space founded on law, memory, and truth.

Five years after February 8, 2021, one truth is clear: as long as farce remains a political method and imposture a strategy, the Republic will continue to be trampled.

Pierre Josué Agénor Cadet