Concertation as a space of opposition convergence. Without unity there is no alternation

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By Mar­cos Pérez Talia

It even seems ob­vi­ous to say that the Paraguayan op­po­si­tion needs to unite to de­feat the Col­orado Party. Every­thing seems to in­di­cate that this to­tal unity will take place un­der the le­gal frame­work of the Na­tional Con­cer­ta­tion. But to get this far, a lot of wa­ter has and will con­tinue to run un­der the bridge. This ar­ti­cle pro­poses a brief glance at the last elec­tions and shows some sta­tis­ti­cal data that sug­gest the “im­per­a­tive need” to con­cretize the op­po­si­tion unity as a ve­hi­cle that will feed the tri­umph in 2023. Ei­ther the op­po­si­tion unites to win, or it will sink sep­a­rately.

The Paraguayan op­po­si­tion, as far as the pres­i­den­tial elec­tions are con­cerned, has had dif­fer­ent strate­gies since the es­tab­lish­ment of democ­racy. In a pre­vi­ous ar­ti­cle, I have stated that since the 1989 pres­i­den­tial elec­tions, the aliancista spirit seems to have con­sol­i­dated as democ­racy was es­tab­lished. Al­though there were also im­por­tant set­backs, such as the breakup of the gov­ern­ment of the Pa­tri­otic Al­liance for Change (APC) in 2012, af­ter hav­ing been the most suc­cess­ful elec­toral ex­pe­ri­ence of the op­po­si­tion in the po­lit­i­cal his­tory of the coun­try.

For a mat­ter of space, I will ex­plore the data of the last two pres­i­den­tial elec­tions (2013 and 2018). In both, the ANR dis­played unity, not only in­ter­nally through “re­pub­li­can em­brace”, but also from the out­side, in the sense that af­ter the death of Lino Oviedo, the strength of UN­ACE re­turned to the Col­orado Party. This char­ac­ter­is­tic of con­ver­gence to­wards unity can be as­sumed to be re­peated in 2023, al­though the in­ter­nal dis­pute of the ANR shows signs that sug­gest oth­er­wise. Let us not for­get that this “fight” in the pri­maries of the ANR seems to be a chil­dren’s quar­rel com­pared to the 90’s and, in gen­eral (ex­cept for the pe­riod of UN­ACE’s exit in the 2000’s), the unity of the ANR has been main­tained.

Let’s go fur­ther into the de­tails of the last elec­tions. In 2013, the breakup of the APC was key for the re­turn of col­oradismo to the gov­ern­ment, as shown in the fol­low­ing table.

Table 1. Main re­sults of the 2013 pres­i­den­tial elec­tion  

Source: own elab­o­ra­tion based on TSJE data. On­line ac­cess: https://​tsje.gov.py/​e2013/​re­sul­ta­dos-elec­ciones-2013.html

The sum of votes re­ceived by the can­di­dates of the par­ties that formed the APC, such as Efraín Ale­gre (889,451), Mario Fer­reiro (141,716) and Aníbal Car­rillo (79,573) was slightly higher than the votes ob­tained by Ho­ra­cio Cartes, but higher, nonethe­less. This math­e­mat­i­cal ex­er­cise, al­though it does not al­ways oc­cur, can also prove a point. If the forces that made up the APC had al­lied, to­gether, they could have had 1,110,740 votes and de­feated the 1,104,169 votes of the Col­orado Party. That shows that the breakup of the APC was a ru­inous busi­ness for the Paraguayan op­po­si­tion that gov­erned be­tween 2008 and 2013. Keep­ing the “united team” would have been a guar­an­tee of suc­cess de­spite the eco­nomic power of Cartes and the, so to say, “good pro­file” that the to­bacco ty­coon showed at that time.

The colorados are aware of the importance of the internal dispute to generate electoral muscle for the presidential elections. The opposition is in this learning curve. In addition, the candidacies of new players and profiles generate hope and enthusiasm in sectors that conventionally did not feel attracted by the traditional political spaces. With the electoral power of the PLRA and the inclusive sum of the other opposition parties, the Concertation can present a competitive formula and aspire to a new alternation. But the key is unity.

For the 2018 elec­tions, the for­mer al­lies learned their les­son, for­got their old an­i­mosi­ties from the pre­vi­ous pe­riod and once again en­tered an elec­toral al­liance for the Ex­ec­u­tive Power. But de­spite the op­po­si­tion unity for the pres­i­den­tial for­mula, they did not have enough votes to de­feat the ANR. Mario Abdo Benítez ob­tained 1,206,067 votes and tri­umphed against the 1,110,464 votes of Efraín Ale­gre (Alianza GA­NAR). The dif­fer­ence, min­i­mal in elec­toral his­tory, was around 3%. It is worth men­tion­ing that PLRA, Frente Guasu, Par­tido Democrático Pro­gre­sista (PDP) and Avanza País (AP), among oth­ers, were part of the GA­NAR Al­liance.

Table 2. Main re­sults of the 2018 pres­i­den­tial elec­tion

Source: own based on TSJE data. On­line ac­cess: https://​www.tsje.gov.py/​elec­ciones-gen­erales-2018.html

Be­sides the em­bar­rass­ment of the fraud­u­lent polls and the scan­dal in the TSJE for the al­leged change of votes in fa­vor of the ANR, the num­bers in the leg­isla­tive elec­tions may ex­plain, in part, the pres­i­den­tial re­sults.

If we con­sider, only for an­a­lyt­i­cal pur­poses, that the Sen­ate vote is the one that most re­sem­bles the “hard vote” of the par­ties and that these tend to be trans­ferred to the Ex­ec­u­tive for­mula, we see in Table 3 that the op­po­si­tion po­lit­i­cal chess­board of 2018 had other sub­stan­tial ac­tors that were not part of the GA­NAR Al­liance: Pa­tria Querida, Hag­amos and Cruzada Na­cional (UN­ACE can be con­sid­ered a vote close to the ANR). And that this sep­a­rate tran­sit could ex­plain the fail­ure of the op­po­si­tion at the pres­i­den­tial level.

Table 3. Sen­ate elec­tion re­sults in 2018 (data of par­ties that won seats) 

Source: own based on TSJE data. On­line ac­cess: https://​www.tsje.gov.py/​elec­ciones-gen­erales-2018.html

Efraín Ale­gre and Leo Rubín ob­tained 1,110,464 votes (42.7%) and the sum of votes in the Sen­ate list of their main al­lies (PLRA + FG + PDP) was 935,429. The dif­fer­ence was 175,035 votes. At the same time, the ANR added 1,206,067 in the pres­i­den­tial elec­tions, but only 766,841 in the Sen­ate, with a dif­fer­ence in fa­vor of Mario Abdo of 439,226. That is to say, the ANR added, from the op­po­si­tion po­lit­i­cal forces in the Sen­ate, al­most three times more than what Efraín Ale­gre and Leo Rubín added.

The ANR thus showed an un­usual ca­pac­ity to at­tract the op­po­si­tion vote, or at least out­side the “hard vote”. An­other way of look­ing at it is through the strength of its in­ter­nal elec­tions. The num­bers sug­gest that for the gen­eral elec­tions for the pres­i­dency (1,206,067 votes), the ANR only needed to add 7% to more than all the vote ac­cu­mu­lated in its in­ter­nal elec­tions (1,119,278 votes). Added to the analy­sis of the Sen­ate, this in­di­cates that, on the one hand, there is a part of the vote of the col­orado in­ter­nal elec­tions for the pres­i­den­tial can­di­dates that is not trans­ferred to the col­orado list in the Sen­ate (which was 766,841 votes), but also shows that these votes that per­haps leak to other po­lit­i­cal forces in the Sen­ate, con­tinue adding to the pres­i­den­tial can­di­date for the ANR, and that this can­di­date also man­ages to at­tract more votes from out­side the party.

The ANR man­ages a very high elec­toral floor (we can say that the 766,841 votes in the Sen­ate con­sti­tute that floor), but it still re­quires part of that “soft vote”, that is, the one that is ca­pa­ble of vot­ing for op­po­si­tion forces in the Sen­ate.

With that sce­nario, the op­po­si­tion can­not af­ford to “waste” votes from op­po­si­tion par­ties such as Pa­tria Querida (PQ) and Cruzada Na­cional (CN), for ex­am­ple. In 2018, both ac­counted for al­most 220,000 votes for the Sen­ate and did not cam­paign for the pres­i­den­tial for­mula Ale­gre-Rubín of the Alianza GA­NAR. Mario Abdo won by only 95,000 votes, so the votes ob­tained by PQ and CN could have been defin­ing.

For­tu­nately for the Paraguayan op­po­si­tion, it seems that the par­ties learned the les­son from the pre­vi­ous process and are on the way to widen the bases of the 2023 pro­ject. Last April, rep­re­sen­ta­tives of sev­eral op­po­si­tion par­ties signed a pre-agree­ment to form an al­liance un­der the fig­ure of the Con­cer­ta­tion, al­though for the time be­ing the al­liance pro­ject only con­tem­plates the Ex­ec­u­tive Power. It was signed by the PLRA, PEN, PDP, PRF, etc. and with the twist, un­like in the past elec­tions, of adding Pa­tria Querida, Cruzada Na­cional and Hag­amos. Of course, the in­cor­po­ra­tion of the pro­gres­sive bloc is miss­ing, al­though its can­di­date Es­per­anza Mar­tinez ac­knowl­edged that they in­tend to join the Con­cer­ta­tion.

This unity is not only im­por­tant be­cause of a mere arith­metic sum of par­ties and move­ments, but also be­cause of the emer­gence of new lead­er­ships that at­tract dif­fer­ent seg­ments of so­ci­ety. Un­like pre­vi­ous elec­toral processes, in the cur­rent of­fer of the Con­cer­ta­tion there are pro­files that mo­bi­lize mid­dle sec­tors such as Se­bastián Vil­larejo, Soledad Núñez or Martín Burt; dis­sent­ing and protest­ing sec­tors such as Payo Cubas, or even broader sec­tors such as Kattya González. To these the lead­er­ship of Efraín Ale­gre should be added, who is aim­ing at a third pres­i­den­tial can­di­dacy.

The Con­cer­ta­tion is tak­ing shape and ap­pears to be an im­por­tant ve­hi­cle for 2023. Never in the his­tory of pres­i­den­tial elec­tions at the na­tional level, the op­po­si­tion has com­peted in­ter­nally to se­lect its pair. This in­tro­duces new el­e­ments, such as the ca­pac­ity to mo­bi­lize, mo­ti­vate and then hook var­i­ous sec­tors around the win­ning team. The col­orados are aware of the im­por­tance of the in­ter­nal dis­pute to gen­er­ate elec­toral mus­cle for the pres­i­den­tial elec­tions. The op­po­si­tion is in this learn­ing curve. In ad­di­tion, the can­di­da­cies of new play­ers and pro­files gen­er­ate hope and en­thu­si­asm in sec­tors that con­ven­tion­ally did not feel at­tracted by the tra­di­tional po­lit­i­cal spaces. With the elec­toral power of the PLRA and the in­clu­sive sum of the other op­po­si­tion par­ties, the Con­cer­ta­tion can pre­sent a com­pet­i­tive for­mula and as­pire to a new al­ter­na­tion. But the key is unity.

Cover im­age: Myr­ian González