Seminar Series: Abstract

Fiji’s Short-lived Experiment in Executive Power-Sharing, May – December 2006
MICHAEL GREEN

Abstract. Much of the commentary on Fiji’s coup of December 2006, particularly that sympathetic to Commodore Bainimarama’s intervention, pays little attention to, or grossly misrepresents, the nature of the government that he removed. Contrary to the military regime’s post-coup rhetoric about the ethnically divisive policies of the Qarase Government, the period from May to December had seen an experiment in executive power-sharing in which, for the first time, the provisions requiring large parties to cooperate in cabinet in the 1997 Constitution were fully and faithfully implemented, with Fiji’s two biggest political parties, each supported by a large majority of one of Fiji’s two major ethnic groups, cooperating in Cabinet. Its untimely end is now held by some commentators to be proof of the inherent unworkability of power-sharing in Fiji. This paper seeks to test that proposition.