Presidential elections are held and Rene Preval wins in a landslide victory. He succeeds the popular Jean-Bertrand Aristide who is barred from running again because of the Haitian constitution’s prohibition on consecutive presidential terms. [ CNN, 12/16/1995 ; CNN, 12/17/1995 ]

Haitian President Rene Preval suspends congress and two-thirds of the senate after a dispute with the opposition party. As a result, more than 7,000 government jobs at the federal and local level become vacant. From this point on, Preval rules by decree. [ BBC, 5/9/2003 ]

After being postponed three times during the last seven months, Haitian parliamentary and local elections are finally held with a turnout of about 60 percent. Voters must fill some 7,625 posts in the legislature, mayoral commissions, and local and rural councils that were made vacant in January 1999, when the congress and local offices were disbanded by President Rene Preval (see January 1999 ). The Lavalas party of Jean-Bertrand Aristide wins the elections by a landslide, winning 15 of the 19 contested Senate seats and some 80 percent of the seats in the House of Assembly. However the results are challenged by the opposition, the US, and the Organization of American States, which say that Haiti’s electoral council did not use the proper formula to calculate the votes. As a result of the controversy, the opposition will boycott the June 9 run-off elections (see July 9, 2000 ) as well as the presidential elections in November (see November 2000 ). More significantly, aid donors threaten that they will continue to withhold $500 million in aid if the government does not come to an agreement with the opposition. [ BBC, 5/22/2000 ; BBC, 5/22/2000 ; BBC, 5/30/2000 ; BBC, 7/8/2000 ; BBC, 7/14/2000 ; CBS News, 11/29/2000 ; Associated Press, 12/7/2000 ; US Department of State, 2/23/2001 ; Dollars and Sense, 9/7/2003 ; Turck, 2/24/2004 ; CounterPunch, 3/1/2004 ; Taipei Times, 3/1/2004 ]