Danilo Medina

Danilo Medina (born November 10, 1951, Arroyo Cano, Dominican Republic) is a Dominican politician and economist who served as the president of the Dominican Republic from 2012 to 2020.

Medina was the oldest of eight children born to a family in the rural town of Arroyo Cano. After the fifth grade he went to live with an uncle in San Juan de la Maguana so that he could continue his education. He went on to study chemical engineering at the Autonomous University of Santo Domingo. As a student, he became actively engaged in politics, and in 1973 he helped his political mentor, Juan Bosch, an academic who had founded the Dominican Revolutionary Party (Partido Revolucionario Dominicano; PRD) and served very briefly as the president of the Dominican Republic, to start another new party, the Dominican Liberation Party (Partido de la Liberación Dominicana; PLD). In 1984 Medina earned a degree in economics from the Technological Institute of Santo Domingo.

He was first elected as a deputy in the National Congress in 1986 and was reelected in 1990 and 1994. He served as the body’s president in 1994–95. In 1996 he resigned from Congress to become secretary of the presidency (chief of staff) for fellow PLD member Pres. Leonel Fernández Reyna (1996–2000). Medina was the party’s presidential candidate in 2000 but lost to Hipólito Mejía of the PRD. When Fernández regained the presidency in 2004, Medina again acted as his chief of staff (2004–06). Relations between the two soured, however, when Medina’s presidential aspirations collided with Fernández’s desire to run for reelection in 2008 (which he did successfully). With Fernández constitutionally prohibited from seeking a third consecutive term, Medina was again the PLD’s presidential candidate in 2012. His running mate was Fernández’s wife, Margarita Cedeño de Fernández, who earlier in the campaign had also sought the party’s nomination as president. In the first round of the presidential election on May 20, 2012, Medina not only outdistanced the rest of the six-candidate field—including his old nemesis Mejía—but he won more than half the votes (just over 51 percent) to eliminate the need for a runoff election and to fulfill his longtime goal of becoming his country’s president.

Early in Medina’s tenure in office, his personal public-approval rating scored well above that of the PLD, largely as a result of his decision to break the government’s contract with the Canadian gold-mining companies Barrick Gold Corporation and Goldcorp Inc. for the massive Pueblo Viejo mine project and to renegotiate terms that were more favourable for the country. Medina, in contrast to Fernández, emphasized a social as opposed to a public-works agenda. Real change, however, fell far short of Medina’s campaign rhetoric. Although government spending was reduced, little progress was made in fulfilling his promises to tackle the high levels of government mismanagement and corruption.

By 2014 Medina’s approval rating had soared into the near-stratospheric 90 percent range, partly because of ongoing divisions within the opposition but also as a reflection of the president’s well-choreographed but low-key interactions with all levels of Dominican society, including the poor. Medina’s popularity was reinforced by the government’s reduction of the fiscal deficit and its implementation of educational labour-law reform, job-creation programs, and long-overdue anticorruption measures. On Medina’s watch the government also reduced its fiscal deficit while maintaining GDP growth of 5 percent and limiting inflation to 4 percent in 2014.

On the other hand, Medina struggled to find a path between negative public attitudes about illegal resident Haitians, the ongoing need for Haitian labour, and the rights of Haitians born in the Dominican Republic. A 2013 court ruling took away the citizenship of the Dominican-born children of Haitians (who began immigrating to the more-prosperous Dominican Republic in 1930). In 2014, responding to international criticism, the government began allowing illegal residents to apply for legal residency permits, and Haitian-born immigrants who had been in the country since before 2011 were also eligible to apply. In June 2015, however, despite reassurances from Medina’s government, there was widespread fear of mass deportations as the deadline for residency application approached. Between the passing of the deadline and January 2016, some 70,000 individuals fled the country, and another 14,000 were officially deported.

With the economy still booming (GDP grew by 7 percent in both 2014 and 2015), Medina remained extraordinarily popular, and in 2015 the constitution was amended to allow a sitting president to serve consecutive terms, setting up Medina to run for reelection in 2016. In May Medina trounced the opposition, garnering more than 60 percent of the vote to capture an absolute majority and preclude the need for a runoff. Indeed, his closest competitor in the crowded field was able to secure only some 35 percent of the vote, with some 70 percent of registered voters having gone to the polls. There were widespread accusations of voting irregularities in the elections for the Assembly, resulting in immediate localized violence as well as demonstrations and rioting later.

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Not long after the start of Medina’s second term, his supporters began advocating to change the constitution yet again to allow Medina to pursue a third term. This prospect, opposed by Fernández and his camp within the PLD, drove such a deep wedge between factions in the party that it pushed Fernández out of the PLD to mount a campaign for the presidency in 2020 as the candidate of the Force of the People (Fuerza del Pueblo; FP) party. Ultimately, Medina chose not to force the issue, and a member of his cabinet, Gonzalo Castillo, became the PLD’s presidential candidate.

Near the end of Medina’s tenure, the Dominican Republic was shaken by the arrival of the global coronavirus pandemic that had originated in China in late 2019 and spread COVID-19, the sometimes fatal disease caused by the virus. Economic growth had already begun to slow in the Dominican Republic even before the onset of the pandemic (with GDP growth having fallen from 7 percent in 2018 to 5.1 percent in 2019), but the closure of businesses and restrictions of movement necessary to curb the spread of the disease wreaked havoc on the country’s tourism-driven economy. Seemingly, disapproval by many Dominicans of Medina’s handling of the crisis contributed to the PLD losing not only the presidency in the 2020 election but also control of the Senate and the Chamber of Deputies.