Haiti has a president: Sweet Micky Martelly

The votes have been cast and counted and, serious fraud aside, it looks like Haiti finally has a new president: musician Michel Martelly or 'Sweet Micky' as he is affectionately known.

He has absolutely zero experience in politics, and a history that would have got him blacklisted him from standing in an election in the UK or US. But It appears to be precisely this - his maverick status - that won him nearly 63 per cent of Haiti's vote in the battle against veteran Mirlande Manigat.

While she campaigned as the mother who could soothe the country ravaged by the January 2010 earthquake, he played on his bad-boy image, and insisted that he would shake up an establishment largely seen to have failed the poorest country in the Americas.
 
Born into a comfortable, middle-class family and educated in a prestigious Roman Catholic school, Martelly soon dropped out of college and became a construction worker in Miami. He later admitted to smoking cannabis and crack cocaine during this period, though insisted he was never addicted.
 
He only really entered the Haitian psyche during the late 1980s when he started to pioneer his own unique form of Kompas music, a Haitian type of dance music fused with jazz and African beats. He was well known for his raucous performances during which he wore everything from diapers to dresses, and occasionally nothing at all.
 
But all of this was cast aside when Martelly decided to run for president following the devastating earthquake that hit the country last year. Alongside other unlikely candidates such as rapper Wyclef Jean, he donned tailored suits and set about campaigning for educational reforms, more efficient aid delivery, and a restoration of the Haitian army he was once in.
 
At early rallies he was the joke candidate who enthusiastically claimed: "I don’t even want to be president!" But he was transformed after hiring the same specialist PR consultants who worked on John McCain's 2008 presidential campaign.
 
Soon people all over the country were wearing T-shirts in the recognisable pink and white colours of his campaign, and parading signs emblazoned with his other nickname 'tet kale' (bald head).
 
Outspoken, honest and regularly seen visiting local towns to play football or hug supporters, he is the man now tasked with the very serious job of pulling Haiti out of the state of crisis it has been in for over a year.
 
The 2010 earthquake killed around 230,000 people and almost completely flattened the capital of Port-au-Prince. Only a fraction of the rubble has actually been cleared, and approximately one million Haitians are still living in tent camps, where sanitation is a massive problem.
 
Cholera, a deadly but easily preventable water-borne disease, has already killed more than 4,700 people. On top of this, only about a quarter of the $5.3bn aid pledged last year has actually been delivered.
 
Martelly will also have to share power with a prime minister picked by Parliament, which is packed with supporters of the musician's enemy, exiled dictator Jean Bertrand Aristide and his party Fanmi Lavalas.
 
With the formal result of the presidential election yet to be announced (April 16), and a with strong history of post-electoral violence in Haiti, Sweet Micky has his work cut out if he is to free the nation of its problems. ·