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