Mauritius 2014
Yearbook 2014
Mauritius. In June, Finance Minister and Deputy Prime Minister Xavier-Luc Duval, representing the Mauritanian Social Democratic Party (Party Mauricien Social Democrat, PMSD), resigned, one of the parties in the government coalition. Mauritius population in 2020 is estimated at 1,271,779. Duval resigned in protest against the reform of the electoral system proposed by Prime Minister Navin Ramgoolam and his party Mauritius’s Labor Party (Parti travailliste, PTR). According to Duval, the reform would benefit PTR. A short time before Duval’s departure, PTR had announced that it intended to form an alliance with the Mauritanian militant movement (Mouvement militant Mauritius, MMM) ahead of the upcoming parliamentary elections.
In early October, President Rajkeswur Purryag disbanded Parliament and in December elections were held. In these, Alliance Lepep, comprising the Movement Socialist Militant (MSM), PMSD and Muvman Liberates (ML), won, which together received 47 of the 62 directly elected seats. According to topb2bwebsites, MSM leader Anerood Jugnauth was appointed prime minister. The second largest in the election was the alliance PTR-MMM, which received 13 of 62 seats. The only other party to enter Parliament was Organization du peuple rodriguais (OPR), which on the island of Rodrigues won two seats.
HISTORY
The island was discovered by the Portuguese in 1505; in the 17th century. the Dutch tried to colonize it, to whom we owe the name Mauritius (from Maurice of Nassau). French rule followed – with the transplantation of colonists to the island renamed Île de France from nearby Réunion -, from 1715 to the Napoleonic wars, which saw the conquest of the island by Great Britain (1810).
The British favored the importation of immigrants from Africa and especially from India. Hence the composite structure of the population. The granting of the right to vote in 1947 automatically nominated the Indians to become the leading group in an independentist perspective in competition with Franco-Mauritians and Creoles, more willing, also for reasons of self-defense, to maintain a relationship with Great Britain. The 1967 elections gave the majority to S. Ramgoolam’s Independence Party and on 12 March 1968 Mauritius became an independent state within the Commonwealth.
Political life after independence was marked by strong political fragmentation, the result of ethnic, religious and linguistic differences, as well as of old and new patronage networks, to which was added, at the end of the 1990s, the new phenomenon of poverty which, despite the successes achieved by the general economy of the country, it has begun to involve important social groups. Among the parties, the Labor party led by S. Ramgoolam (Mauritius labor party, MLP), that of the Franco-Mauritians and the Creoles (Mouvement militant mauricien, MMM), founded by P. Bérenger, on moderate leftist positions, stood out, and the Indian one, the Mouvement socialiste mauricien (MSM), founded by A. Jugnauth and sided in favor of leaving the Commonwealth. The government alliance between MMM and MSM, the result of the agreement on institutional reform that had led to the proclamation of the Republic in March 1992 (within the Commonwealth), was soon cracked by internal disputes and episodes of financial corruption that involved the Prime Minister Jugnauth. Neither the numerous government reshuffles nor the expansion of the coalition could avoid the crisis. The early elections of 1995 saw a landslide victory for the MLP-MMM cartel. The new cabinet chaired by Ramgoolam was soon divided, however, and in 1997 Ramgoolam formed a coalition government with the Parti mauricien social-démocrate, which in 1999 faced the explosion of serious tensions between Hindus and Creoles, then among others. ethnic and religious communities. The decline in consensus around the government and the alliance, in opposition, of the MMM with the MSM, led to the electoral defeat of the government coalition. In 2003, Bérenger became the first non-Hindu head of government and launched a series of reforms including improved education. The elections of 2005 and those of 2010 saw Ramgoolam prevail again, who engaged in the battle against unemployment and inflation, while in the elections for the renewal of the National Assembly held in December 2014, the party formed by the MLP and the MMM, who signed an electoral pact with the aim of promoting a constitutional reform that would give the president greater powers, A. Jugnauth, who took over from Ramgoolam as prime minister, held until his resignation in favor of his son P. Jugnauth resigned in January 2017. The political consultations held in November 2019 reconfirmed the executive headed by Jugnauth as head of the country, which obtained an absolute majority, winning 42 seats out of 70.
