could be worse…

Follow the bouncing ball of Liberian leadership.

If I see this correctly, we had… oh, Charles Taylor of one party, who ran on this…

 In 1997, during a period of peace, Charles Taylor, a warlord, became president, having made it clear that he would go back to war if not elected. Supporters chanted, “He killed my ma, he killed my pa, but I’ll vote for him.”

Next up, the reformer on the other party… Ellen Johnson Sirleaf.

Then… er… a football player?  Who…

Mr Weah is idolised, particularly among the young—and more than half the electorate is under 33. He lost to the current president, Ellen Johnson Sirleaf, in 2005.

And the new asset of all political hopefuls…

Yet there are doubts about the kind of leader Mr Weah will be. Since his election as a senator in 2014, he has rarely attended parliament. Nor has he introduced or co-sponsored any legislation. Mr Weah’s relative lack of education, though, only seems to make him more popular. His supporters see the former slum-dweller as one of them—a champion from their streets.

But he won over the old supporters of Taylor due to having Taylor’s wife as running mate.

The incoming vice-president, Jewel Howard-Taylor, is a popular senator who once tried to make homosexuality punishable by death. She is also Mr Taylor’s ex-wife, which helped attract voters who still support the former tyrant (who is now in prison in Britain for war crimes committed in neighbouring Sierra Leone).

… still holding to a version of the “Yah!  Killed my folks” line, I see…

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