In Burkina Faso, Leader Keeps Cool Under Fire

The calm is tenuous. Students, soldiers, shopkeepers, police officers and even members of the presidential guard have all taken part in protests over the last two months, sometimes violently. A suspicious death in police custody prompted a march by students; stores were looted by military men disgruntled over low pay; and angry merchants, in retaliation, attacked government buildings — all a shock in this landlocked country with few resources and mostly bypassed by an outside world focused on places with oil and crops.

But while there have been opposition demands for the departure of President Blaise Compaoré after 24 years in office, the imperturbable leader is not leaving.

Mr. Compaoré, a former army captain who came to power in a bloody coup in 1987 that led to the killing of President Thomas Sankara, a military comrade of Mr. Compaoré’s, has recently faced down his most serious challenge yet. The governing party’s headquarters is a looted-out shell, signboards of the government ministries downtown are shattered and some stores have been stripped bare of goods by rampaging soldiers.

Mr. Compaoré is not budging, though, just as he would not after similar but less serious outbreaks in 1999, 2003, 2006, 2007 and 2008, when government buildings were also defaced.

How he has lasted is a lesson in survival strategies for long-term autocrats: negotiate, conciliate, spare the gun (there have been only about six deaths in 10 weeks of troubles), let others do the talking, and remain above the fray.

Mr. Compaoré, invisible in public and rarely seen on state television, met with army officers on April 29 after mutinous soldiers went on rampages in March and April. The local papers showed him raising a glass with the officers after promising more money. In earlier gestures to the protesters, he had dismissed his government and named a diplomat and former journalist as prime minister.

His sweltering country of 15 million people just below the Sahara was one of the world’s poorest when he seized power in 1987, and it remains so today, with a per capita income that is less than half the African average. It is largely illiterate — only 26 percent can read and write — and in the absence of a large, educated middle class to help form a broadly popular opposition, Mr. Compaoré has been regularly re-elected with over 80 percent of the vote.

He has also skillfully managed to undermine his political rivals and persuade many people that he is somehow separate from the troubles swirling around his government, a feat few of the leaders under threat in the Arab world have accomplished.

On the streets of this low-slung capital, where it can reach 110 degrees by noon, there is little appetite for chasing him from power, even among the merchants looted by his marauding soldiers.

“The president is not responsible for what the soldiers did; it’s their commanders,” said Mathias Nikiema, a downtown cellphone vendor who has twice been ransacked by military men. “The president, he’s trying to listen to them.”

Oumarou Zigani, another phone vendor who suffered at the soldiers’ hands and who took part in one of the protest marches, agreed. “It’s not the president; it’s the government,” he said. “The president, there’s no problem with him. It’s the people under him.”

Besides, Mr. Nikiema, said, “There is no one to take his place.”

And that turns out to be a central element of Mr. Compaoré’s strategy.

“They say, ‘It’s me or chaos,’?” said Augustin Loada, a political scientist who directs the Center for Democratic Governance, a research group here, summing up the government’s argument. “If our system doesn’t work, there’s nothing. People are afraid of that.”