Blinken in Haiti to help Caribbean nation aim for peace and security to hold 2025 elections

U.S. Secretary of State Antony Blinken met in Port-au-Prince with Haitian transitional authorities on Thursday to discuss the prospect of the Caribbean country holding elections in November 2025. The possibility of achieving the electoral target date would commence with the improvement of security after the start of the multinational mission led by Kenya.

“Security is the foundation for everything that needs to happen going forward, including getting on a pathway to elections next year, but also delivering services to the Haitian people, allowing development to go forward, allowing life to return to a greater semblance of normalcy,” Blinken told reporters, alongside Haitian Prime Minister Garry Conille in Port-au-Prince.

“But in all of these efforts and so many more, the government and the prime minister are critical actors. The United States is resolutely here in support of Haiti, but so are many other partners and many other countries. And of course, we’ll have an opportunity as well in New York at the U.N. General Assembly to continue to build on that support.”

Blinken, the first Secretary of State to visit the Caribbean country since former Sen. John Kerry, who served between 2013 and 2017 during President Barack Obama's second term, said that the next “critical” step is to establish an electoral council, an issue he discussed today with Edgard Leblanc Fils, the head of the Presidential Transition Council.

This electoral council should lay the foundations for a calendar for holding free elections in November 2025 and for a change of government between “February and March 2026,” as detailed by Leblanc Fils.

“Next week, at the next meeting of the Council of Ministers, the formation of the provisional Electoral Council will be presented. The Electoral Council, once installed, must begin to work to guarantee the population an electoral process at the end of 2025,” said Leblanc Fils during his appearance with Blinken before the press in the Haitian capital.

Haiti has been mired in misgovernance and a deep institutional crisis riddled with violence for years since the July 2021 assassination of President Jovenel Moïse.

At the beginning of this year, armed gangs began to control a large part of the capital, which made the deploment of the compromised Multinational Security Support Mission (MSS) more urgent, which was delayed until June.

"The task ahead of us is extremely complex, but we feel confident that if our partners commit to walking with us, we will achieve our objectives," Conille said.

The United States is the main support in terms of logistics and funds, with more than 300 million dollars cotributed to the mission, which must be renewed at the end of this month with the approval of the United Nations Security Council.