Peña, the dispute over the meaning of “change” and the persistent ignorance about the ANR

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By José Duarte Pe­nayo.

On the eve of the elec­tions, a jour­nal­ist from the Ar­gen­tinean me­dia C5N asked a ven­dor at Mer­cado 4 if she wanted “change or con­ti­nu­ity”. As the an­swer was “I want change”, the im­me­di­ate ques­tion was whether the vote would go to Efraín Ale­gre or Paraguayo Cubas. To the sur­prise of the jour­nal­ist, and surely of her au­di­ence, the an­swer was “I will vote for Santi Peña”. The sit­u­a­tion -in which a voter as­so­ci­ated the change to Santi Peña and not to Efraín or Payo- sur­prised the re­porter, who did not nec­es­sar­ily have the duty to know in depth all the as­pects of the Paraguayan po­lit­i­cal sit­u­a­tion. What is strik­ing, and much more shock­ing and prob­lem­atic, is when such ig­no­rance is the ba­sis for read­ings on the last elec­toral con­tests.

Be­yond the anec­dotes, the fact that the in­ter­vie­wee in ques­tion con­sid­ered the Col­orado Party as a more at­trac­tive op­tion for change than the pro­posal of the Con­certación or the Na­tional Cru­sade, is some­thing that must be taken very se­ri­ously if one wants to un­der­stand the ef­fec­tive­ness of one of the few po­lit­i­cal par­ties in the world that has emerged stronger af­ter the pan­demic. The ANR ob­tained a re­sound­ing elec­toral vic­tory, a ma­jor­ity in both cham­bers, 15 of the 17 gov­er­nor­ships and over 60% of the de­part­men­tal coun­cils. With the re­sults ob­tained, if a bal­lot elec­tion sys­tem were in force in Paraguay, as in the Ar­gen­tinean model, the Col­orado Party would have won in the first round, since it ob­tained more than 40% and more than 10% with the sec­ond in pref­er­ence, Efraín Ale­gre.

De­spite these facts, some seek to rel­a­tivize the over­whelm­ing col­orado vic­tory, sug­gest­ing that it was a sort of Pyrrhic vic­tory, al­leg­ing that the arith­metic sum of the votes of the Con­certación and those of Payo Cubas ex­ceed the one ob­tained by the ANR. Some, such as Leo Rubín, Ale­gre’s for­mer vice pres­i­den­tial can­di­date in 2018, even went so far as to claim that San­ti­ago Peña was ac­tu­ally “re­jected by the ma­jor­ity”. The same read­ing be­gan to cir­cu­late as a con­sol­ing mantra in the so­cial net­works, be­fore the harsh awak­en­ing of the mi­cro­cli­mate fan­tasies that fore­bade, once again, a sup­posed ter­mi­nal cri­sis of the ANR.

It is to be expected that when the smoke of the “fraud” subsides and the plotting intensity into which some recently defeated actors entered, it becomes even clearer that beyond the mistakes of the opposition parties, the unity of the Colorado Party and its strong internal democracy, which strengthens its institutionality each period, continues to make the Colorado Party the most effective interpreter of national politics.

These state­ments are su­per­fi­cial to say the least. They over­look the fact that San­ti­ago Peña’s cam­paign never ap­pealed to con­tinuism but was once again the ren­o­vat­ing and crit­i­cal pro­posal of an­other in­cum­bent Col­orado gov­ern­ment.  They also hide the fact that in these elec­tions there was never a di­chotomy be­tween “change ver­sus con­tinuism”, but rather the dis­pute was about which force bet­ter rep­re­sented change. Fi­nally, the bi­ased views do not ques­tion those who sought to sus­tain the ex­is­tence of a sup­posed po­lar­iza­tion sce­nario be­tween Peña and Ale­gre, with­out any ev­i­dence or, worse, fol­low­ing the data of the al­most unique mea­sure­ment that pre­dicted a tech­ni­cal tie be­tween the can­di­dates in ques­tion, the failed dig­i­tal sur­vey of At­las In­tel.

The op­po­si­tion finds it dif­fi­cult to rec­og­nize that dur­ing these elec­tions there were three pro­pos­als for change to be con­sid­ered by the Paraguayan elec­torate. The first one was pro­posed by the ANR, led by San­ti­ago Peña with his slo­gan “We are go­ing to be bet­ter off”, af­ter win­ning against the rul­ing party in pri­mary elec­tions in which more than 1,200,000 ANR mem­bers par­tic­i­pated. The sec­ond pro­posal for change came from the Con­certación and its idea of po­lit­i­cal al­ter­na­tion with its slo­gan “Change is com­ing”, giv­ing a strong in­sti­tu­tional and in­tra-po­lit­i­cal con­tent to the sig­ni­fier of change. The third pro­posal came from Paraguayo Cubas’ anti-sys­temic con­tes­ta­tion, the only pro­ject with re­foun­da­tional as­pi­ra­tions of this po­lit­i­cal process, by propos­ing a change of regime via a new Con­sti­tu­tion, as well as mea­sures that go against all the con­sen­suses that be­came com­mon­place dur­ing the de­mo­c­ra­tic process ini­ti­ated in 1989.

The idea that the re­sults should be read as a “fun­da­men­tal de­feat” of the ANR, or as the sim­ple vic­tory of “con­tinuism”, ig­nores cen­tral fea­tures of the dy­nam­ics of the cen­te­nary party it­self. The Col­orado Party demon­strated in these years of democ­racy that no fac­tion can ex­er­cise to­tal con­trol of the party and that, in gen­eral, the fac­tion that pro­poses a change (nor­mally the “dis­si­dence”) is the one that has more pos­si­bil­i­ties of win­ning the in­ter­nal elec­tions for the pres­i­dency.  Thus, it is not a sim­ple slo­gan that the Col­orado Party in­te­grates within it, at the same time, fac­tions that are power and fac­tions that are op­po­si­tion.

The triv­ial read­ing that the ANR “won but did not win” also ig­nores that the Con­certación not only failed in its “in­sti­tu­tional” dis­pute against the Col­orado Party, but also failed “on the out­side”, since it was com­pletely blurred by the anti-sys­tem pro­posal rep­re­sented by Payo, in dis­course, aes­thet­ics and ac­tion. The Con­certación was a pro­posal for change that did not know how to deal with the ren­o­vat­ing force of the ANR, nor how to neu­tral­ize the style and the pro­posal of rad­i­cal rup­ture em­bod­ied by Payo.

These cal­cu­la­tions of el­e­men­tary arith­metic and ex­er­cises in coun­ter­fac­tual his­tory (“if we had united, his­tory would be dif­fer­ent”) not only ig­nore ques­tions of fact that can be as­cer­tained by fol­low­ing the news.  They are also the ex­pres­sion of deeper con­cep­tual in­con­sis­ten­cies about the in­ter­pre­ta­tive de­mands of pol­i­tics.  This deficit is the one that leads to con­sider, for ex­am­ple, that one can make ad­di­tions and sub­trac­tions on the be­hav­ior of the elec­torate, as if the rea­sons for vot­ing re­sponded to sim­ple mo­tives. Are the rea­sons for vot­ing for a can­di­date of the po­lit­i­cal es­tab­lish­ment, who sought for the third time to be pres­i­dent, com­pat­i­ble with those who voted for a fig­ure who promises to re-found Paraguay “with a belt and sus­penders”?

At this point, it should also be re­mem­bered that, dur­ing the whole cam­paign, voices of the op­po­si­tion es­tab­lish­ment as­sured that Payo Cubas was tak­ing votes away from Peña and that he would be­come the 2023 ver­sion of the 2008 can­di­date Lino Oviedo, who man­aged to cap­ture votes from the Col­ored Party and, in this way, fa­vored the vic­tory of Fer­nando Lugo, be­com­ing, so far, the only pres­i­dent who did not come from the ANR since the tran­si­tion. From this point of view, who can as­sure that, if the Na­tional Cru­sade can­di­date did not com­pete in these elec­tions, Santi Peña would not have ob­tained even more dif­fer­ence?

To re­turn to the ques­tion of “change”, it should be men­tioned that words have mul­ti­ple de­f­i­n­i­tions, not only those ref­er­enced in dic­tio­nar­ies, but, above all, in the uses that so­cial ac­tors make of them and the mean­ings that con­texts im­print on them. That is why, for many, pol­i­tics is a per­ma­nent dis­pute for mean­ing. This is the case of Thomas Hobbes, who saw the Leviathan as the se­man­tic sta­bi­lizer of quar­rels; of Valentin Voloshi­nov, who con­sid­ered lan­guage as the arena of class strug­gle; of Jür­gen Haber­mas, who con­sid­ers the pub­lic space as an in­stance in which the ve­rac­ity of the pub­lic word is com­mu­nica­tively de­fined, or of Ernesto La­clau, who ex­plained the ar­tic­u­lat­ing role of the sig­ni­fier in the dis­pute over the bor­ders of the so­cial.

Is it cor­rect to state that the mo­ti­va­tion for not vot­ing for Peña was only the re­jec­tion of the cur­rent rul­ing party?  To say that the sum of those who did not vote for Peña, 52% of the elec­torate, had in mind the fall of col­oradismo as the only mo­ti­va­tion for vot­ing is mere spec­u­la­tion, while the over­whelm­ing vic­tory of the ANR in all the con­tested po­si­tions is a fact with­out dis­cus­sion. It is to be ex­pected that when the smoke of the “fraud” sub­sides and the plot­ting in­ten­sity into which some re­cently de­feated ac­tors en­tered, it be­comes even clearer that be­yond the mis­takes of the op­po­si­tion par­ties, the unity of the Col­orado Party and its strong in­ter­nal democ­racy, which strength­ens its in­sti­tu­tion­al­ity each pe­riod, con­tin­ues to make the Col­orado Party the most ef­fec­tive in­ter­preter of na­tional pol­i­tics.

Cover im­age: Luis Robayo – AFP