Mr Martelly is a politically inexperienced populist. He will find it hard to get business-friendly reforms through a legislature in which his party has few seats and which rejected his first two choices for prime minister. The government is dithering over whether to renew the mandate of the Interim Haiti Reconstruction Commission, a body set up after the earthquake to co-ordinate foreign aid. Mr Martelly may be right that to attract private investment Haiti needs to change its image of eternal aid supplicant into one of a hard-working place. But it also needs to change realities on the ground, and that may be harder.