Without obeying any of the official calendars, the Salvadoran political parties –some more than others- are preparing their campaigns for the general elections of 2009. They do not have the specific names of the candidates, and no one has decided either if the municipal and the legislative electoral period as well as the presidential electoral period will take place in different dates. That does not seem to matter right now, because what the political parties want is to create a sense of sympathy among the population in order to transform this sympathy into enough votes to either increase or just keep a certain amount of political power.
            What should be seen as a time to prepare substantial governmental proposals or to critically analyze the mistakes of the present political actions, the political parties see as a period to focus on the same trivial matters, that is, to promote the colors of their political institutions, and to discredit their political contenders and the projects promoted by other parties. This is just more of the same.
            That rehearsal –or that circus- is an insufferable tradition since 1982. Some people even think that the elections are really not that important, and that all they do is to define who will enjoy the benefits of the political power for a certain period of time stipulated by the law for the different positions subjected to a popular election system… until the new electoral period comes along and the cycle repeats itself again.
            These are the remains of the Salvadoran democracy. It is just an electoral game that, beyond its permanent technical flaws, is not resolving the most critical problems of the Salvadoran society. This is an electoral game that portrays the divorce between politics and the Salvadoran society. Some people think that elections are the quintessential factor of democracy, and even believe that it is enough to follow the electoral calendars to keep the Salvadoran democracy in good health. Just a few people dare to question the quality of that democracy, as well as its inability to respond to the social and to the economic interests of the majority.
            One of the most terrible political diseases of El Salvador is to have reduced the concept of democracy to a periodical electoral sham where the participation of the citizenry does not go beyond the act of voting. The novelist Jose Saramago has revealed in his novel “The Name and The Thing” the perverse mechanism behind this sort of reductions. According to Saramago, “… the act of voting, being the expression of a certain political will, is simultaneously a renunciation to that will implicitly present in the delegation operated by the voter”. When a citizen gives away a vote, he or she reveals a personal political will; however, this action puts in someone else’s hands the power to administrate that personal will.
            And it is precisely here where the expectations of the citizenry are blinded, because those who become authorities use the power that has been given to them for their own personal benefit and to favor the financial oligarchies. Saramago indicates that “… no community in its right mind would even think about electing corrupt individuals as congressmen or as governmental authorities, even if the every-day bitter experiences show us that most of the national and the international power that rules the world is in the hands of criminals or in the hands of those who just give orders”.
            In other words, the authorities who represent the people go in a different direction and stay away from those who elected them. Sometimes those who are elected use the power they have in their hands to corrupt themselves and to corrupt others near them. The citizens –convinced by the media, or by the religious and the educational campaigns that their responsibility is just voting to elect a candidate- have no other choice but to become passive victims of the abuse and the mistakes of the elected ones, and wait for the next electoral event to express their political discontent.
            The diagnosis of Saramago, the Portuguese writer and holder of the 1998 Literature Nobel Prize, is valid for El Salvador. With their votes, the citizens put their political will in the hands of the parties and the leaders that have many times betrayed that will by overlooking the needs of the society. The political participation of the society has reduced itself to the act of voting, with this, an active society is nowhere to be found. The people are not used to closely watch the performance of the authorities, and that is why many institutions become just a place to lounge for the politicians and their bureaucratic comrades. Corruption, abuse, impunity, arrogance and other insulting behaviors are the result of the established weak institutional mechanisms, as well as the result of the political patrimonial attitude of a society in which the voters and those elected by them live in separate worlds.
            Ultimately, since the end of the civil war, the Salvadoran society has been forced to accept that the political democracy –a concept reduced to “periodical elections”- is all the democracy that there is, and that it would not be very realistic to expect anything different from what the authorities have been doing in politics or with the economy. No one wants to admit that, as Saramago says, “a political democracy is not very useful if it is not actually the root of an effective and a specific economic democracy accompanied by a cultural democracy”.
            The country has to stop thinking that democracy will just develop by itself just because it is a valid concept. In fact, the economic democracy and the cultural democracy –both suggested by Saramago- are truly missed. The mechanisms of the political dimension of democracy are so tarnished by corruption that to speak about the existence of a political democracy is not a very realistic thought. These are just a few perspectives to face the up-coming presidential elections, because, sadly, nothing much can be expected from it in 2009.

From the party to the cabinet and vice-versa: the designation
of the public officials in ARENA

Recycled public officials