Suriname, South America’s smallest independent country, has elected its first woman head of state. Jennifer Simons-Geerlings served from 1996 to 2020 in the Surinamese National Assembly as a member of the National Democratic Party (NDP) founded by 1980s dictator Desi Bouterse. While in news coverage Simons was often overshadowed by Bouterse and other male politicians, she has long been one of the country’s most popular politicians. From 2010 to 2020, she served as chair of the National Assembly.
Nearly six weeks after the May 25 parliamentary elections, the newly seated National Assembly elected Simons—now leader of the National Democratic Party (NDP)—as the country’s next president. The NDP had won 18 of the Assembly’s 51 seats. As in other democraties around the world over the last 24 months, Suriname’s incumbent president, Chan Santokhi, had become toxically unpopular. The junior parties in Santokhi’s government quickly threw their weight behind Simons. Santokhi sought to hold on to power through arcane parliamentary maneuvering but came up short. On the final vote, Simons secured exactly the 34 votes required to win.
This is a pivotal point in the young country’s history. Santokhi’s single term followed two in which Bouterse had returned to power, this time as a democratically elected president. The recent Bouterse years had impoverished Suriname and left it sidelined diplomatically. Now, with an oil boom around the corner, the focus turns to what kind of president Simons will be.
Will she emulate Bouterse’s emphasis on pro-poor policies? Will she continue the NDP’s history of spending beyond government receipts and relying on shadow funding to make up the shortfall?Can she avoid the corruption scandals that plagued both her predecessors? Or will Simons—an epidemiologist by training with an unconventional political trajectory—chart a new course entirely?
Bouterse and the Birth of the NDP
Bouterse first came to power in the 1980 Sergeants’ Coup, one of a wave of left-wing coups by junior military officers and paramilitary leaders in the Global South. Others brought to power Maurice Bishop in Grenada, Jerry Rawlings in Ghana, and Thomas Sankara in Burkina Faso.
Bouterse’s dictatorship supported redistributionist policies, sought to increase national revenues from mining, and closely regulated consumer prices with an eye to the lower classes. The Dutch government cancelled economic development programs with Suriname, its former colony, and tried to blockade the country economically.
Bouterse’s dictatorship supported redistributionist policies, sought to increase national revenues from mining, and closely regulated consumer prices with an eye to the lower classes.
This was in line with efforts by the United States and its allies to squeeze out of power regimes that might sympathize with the Soviet Union in the closing years of the Cold War. Bouterse, by aligning himself with Cuba, Grenada, Nicaragua, Venezuela, and Libya, and by facilitating illicit international financial flows involving these countries, was able to keep some money flowing through the Surinamese economy and government.
In December 1982, in what came to be known as the “December Murders,” 15 opponents of the regime were arrested and executed without trial. For the rest of the decade, other domestic opponents and allies of the regime pushed for a return to democracy. Accordingly, Bouterse transitioned Suriname back to a constitutional regime with a multi-party system. In 1987, as part of the country’s extended transition to democracy, he founded the NDP, which largely took over the ideological position of the junta he had led.
Bouterse managed to follow in the footsteps of Jerry Rawlings and became one of the few leftist dictators of the early 1980s to transition freely to democratic politics in the 1990s. But while Rawlings’ National Democratic Congress won its elections in Ghana, the NDP was trounced in 1991 by an ideologically diverse coalition unified by the desire to turn a new page.
Simons and the Shadow of Bouterse
In 1991, Ronald Venetiaan of the National Party of Suriname (NPS) became president. The NPS was the democratic socialist party that Bouterse had ejected from power in 1980. By that time, it had already started to lose the support of the working-class urban population that had been its electoral bedrock since the 1950s.
Simons first ran for the National Assembly in 1996, a landslide election for the NDP. Four years later, she was elected the leader of the party’s parliamentary delegation as it found itself again in opposition to Venetiaan and the NPS.
Bouterse, facing mounting legal pressure on Dutch charges of drug smuggling and Surinamese charges relating to the 1982 December Murders, put himself forward for the presidency in 2010, winning and gaining several years of respite.
Simons had a good reputation among her peers in the NDP and its coalition partners, and was successful in advancing its popular legislative agenda through the chamber
In the same year, Simons was elected chairperson of the National Assembly. She had a good reputation among her peers in the NDP and its coalition partners, and was successful in advancing its popular legislative agenda through the chamber. Yet Bouterse’s legal troubles cast a shadow; passing and maintaining an amnesty law that would cover him was politically controversial for Simons and the NDP. Simons also came under fire for her aggressive management of speaking time for the NPS and Santokhi’s Progressive Reform Party (VHP), both of which were increasingly focused on bringing Bouterse to justice.
With the Dutch again imposing economic sanctions and Bouterse again turning to countries like Venezuela and Iran for financial support, the government nearly ran out of money during Bouterse’s second term. In 2020, for the first time in a quarter century, Simons did not run for reelection to parliament. Bouterse was defeated, and Santokhi became president.
Santokhi, Austerity, and More Corruption
Chan Santokhi had risen through the ranks of the national police, becoming commissioner in 1991. In that role in 2000, he had taken charge of the investigation of the December Murders. Five years later, he was named justice minister. Santokhi’s tireless pursuit of justice in that case won him a reputation for probity and competence. He soon became the second-most popular politician in the country, ahead of Simons and behind only Bouterse. In 2020, with the economy in decline, Santokhi led the VHP to its best results ever, becoming president at the head of a coalition including the NPS and several smaller parties.
His presidential term was defined by pro-business policies and strict austerity in government spending, in response to which protesters demonstrated throughout Paramaribo and sacked the National Assembly in February 2023. Meanwhile, corruption and ministerial incompetence continued unabated. Santokhi nominated his wife and son to posts for which they were not qualified; logging, mining, and farming concessions were given out without due process. Signs that the government-owned airline would lose its access to European airspace without operational reforms were ignored.
Santokhi’s presidential term was defined by pro-business policies and strict austerity in government spending, in response to which protesters demonstrated throughout Paramaribo and sacked the National Assembly in February 2023.
His record, however, was not all negative. In 2023, the National Assembly passed reform of the electoral code to ensure that all votes nationally had equal weight. A promising offshore oil deposit that had been in development since 2019 seems to have been managed with care. After the severe economic depression and mismanagement of government finances under the last Bouterse administration, the first few years of Santokhi’s term saw the country’s sovereign credit rating continue the decline it had started before his election. But in 2024, Moody’s upgraded the country’s rating two notches to Caa3 with a positive outlook. Santokhi, banking on a second term, postponed a round of negotiations with the International Monetary Fund scheduled for that year to 2025.
Reform, or Return to Pariah Status?
By the beginning of this year, Santokhi’s path to a second term seemed uncertain. Bouterse, having lost his battle with the Surinamese legal system in 2023, fled and died in 2024, taking some of the wind out of the VHP’s sails. Without Bouterse to run against, the sinking economic performance of the last five years put enough downward pressure on the middle class that the VHP’s platform of continued austerity and business-friendly policies couldn’t find a broad base of popularity. In the end, the VHP won only 17 seats, down 3 from its results 5 years before.
Alongside Simons, Gregory Rusland of the NPS will serve as vice president. The decision of Rusland to lead the NPS into a coalition government with Simons and the NDP earned him a stark rebuke from Venetiaan, Suriname’s only head of state to have won three terms, in 1991, 2000, and 2005. Venetiaan had built his career on opposition to the NDP, steering his own party rightward in the process. He has been quoted in the press wondering whether Simons will lead Suriname back into economic alignment with rogue states.
Simons’ government will face fiscal and budgetary challenges. It has already withdrawn three nominees for finance minister, and suggested that Santokhi may have overstated financial projections toward the end of his term. Whether or not the claim is borne out, it suggests that negotiations with the IMF may not go smoothly.
Still, the strengthening international price of gold should give Simons breathing room to shape budgetary policy that Santokhi did not have. Whether that will be enough to establish fiscal security that can bridge the government until oil revenues start to arrive in 2028 is unclear. In any event, odds are good that by the five-year-mark of her own administration, the people of Suriname will have a better idea than they do today of what its political class as a whole stands for after the definitive end of the Bouterse era, and whether the country will increasingly center standard economic management policies, or whether trafficking and corruption remain a national problem, difficult to consign to the past.
D. S. Battistoli’s work has been published in Africa Is A Country, the Binghamton Prospect, Brittle Paper, and the NACLA Bulletin. He is a writer and international development worker focused on West and Central Africa and its diaspora. He lives in Senegal with his family and his books.