Suriname is expected to elect its first female president this Sunday, the congresswoman and physician Jennifer Geerlings-Simons, 71, who will run unopposed after the ruling party decided not to field a candidate.
Geerlings-Simons will succeed current president Chandrikapersad Santokhi, 66, who has been in office since 2020 and was eligible for re-election – but whose party failed to secure the two-thirds parliamentary majority required in the country’s indirect voting system.
She will take office at a moment of profound contradiction for the former Dutch colony. Independent since 1975, it is still one of the poorest countries in the region, yet Suriname has recently discovered significant offshore oil reserves that could generate billions of dollars in revenue over the coming decades. The country is not expected to begin production until 2028.
Geerlings-Simons began her rise to power on 25 May, when voters elected the 51 members of Suriname’s National Assembly, though the results produced no clear winner.
Her National Democratic party secured a narrow lead with 18 seats, just ahead of Santokhi’s party, which won 17. In the days that followed, she managed to form a coalition with five other parties, giving her the minimum 34 seats required to be appointed president.
Last Thursday, which was the deadline for registering presidential candidates, Santokhi’s Progressive Reform party announced it would not be putting forward a nominee.
Geerlings-Simons’s party was founded by Dési Bouterse, who ruled as a dictator from 1980 to 1987, a period during which his regime was accused of executing 15 political opponents in 1982. Following Suriname’s return to democracy, Bouterse was elected president in 2010 and re-elected in 2015, before handing over to Santokhi.
The current president told local media there would be a “smooth transition” of power.
Corruption scandals marked his five-year term, and he was forced to seek assistance from the International Monetary Fund to stabilise the economy. While his austerity measures helped restructure Suriname’s public debt, they also triggered violent protests in the country of 600,000 people.
During his presidency, oil reserves were discovered 90 miles (150km) off Suriname’s coast. The project to extract them is led by the French multinational TotalEnergies, which announced in October that it would invest $10.5bn to develop the oilfield.
Santokhi went so far as to propose a “royalties for everyone” scheme, under which every Surinamese citizen would receive US$750 in a savings account, with an annual interest rate of 7%. The plan was one of his key re-election pledges – but it wasn’t enough to secure his party a majority.
With more than 90% of its territory covered by tropical rainforest, Suriname has come under increasing pressure over illegal gold mining and logging, practices that Geerlings-Simons publicly condemned during her time as chair of the National Assembly, where she played a role in advancing environmental regulations.
