Pondering on the defeat of the Concertación

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By Mar­cos Pérez Talia.

Last April 30, a new de­feat of prob­a­bly the most im­por­tant op­po­si­tion front formed to com­pete against the Col­orado Party was con­sum­mated. The fi­nal dif­fer­ence, as huge as it was un­ex­pected, makes all ex­pla­na­tions seem valid. Here we seek to pro­pose a cou­ple of vari­ables that shed light on the fail­ure of the op­po­si­tion in gen­eral and of the Con­certación in par­tic­u­lar.

The first read­ing that the re­sults sug­gest is that the di­vi­sion of the op­po­si­tion into, at least, two big for­mu­las (Con­certación and Payo Cubas) fa­vored the new Col­orado tri­umph. It is clear that in pol­i­tics mere math­e­mat­ics does not work, but it is also ev­i­dent that with high op­po­si­tion dis­per­sion there is no chance of win­ning against the ANR.

The Na­tional Cru­sade party of Payo Cubas was the first to ap­prove its en­try to the Con­certación and, in fact, signed the found­ing act on April 22, 2022. At that time, the one who of­fered the great­est re­sis­tance against the mech­a­nism of se­lec­tion of the pres­i­den­tial can­di­dacy was Kattya González, and not even Cubas. But when the dead­line to reg­is­ter pres­i­den­tial pre-can­di­da­tures was ap­proach­ing, Payo Cubas raised his voice in­di­cat­ing that he wanted to team up with Efraín Ale­gre. As this fi­nally did not hap­pen, be­cause Ale­gre and Soledad Núñez reached an agree­ment, Cubas opted to with­draw from the Con­certación. The same hap­pened with Eu­clides Acevedo and part of the Frente Guasú, who also de­cided to with­draw even when in­ter­nal elec­tions with a na­tional elec­toral roll were ap­proved, as they re­quested. Table 1 shows the pos­si­ble sce­nar­ios, to il­lus­trate the elec­toral size of the po­lit­i­cal forces in­side and out­side the Con­certación.

Table 1. Main re­sults with and with­out the split of the Con­certación

Source: https://​re­sul­ta­dos.tsje.gov.py/​pub­li­ca­cion/​di­vul­ga­cion.html

With Mon­day’s pa­per in­trigu­ing ques­tions arise: why did Payo with­draw from the Con­certación, hav­ing had that flow of votes he had on April 30? If he re­ally wanted the op­po­si­tion to tri­umph in 2023, why did he not com­pete in­ter­nally as Se­bastián Vil­larejo or Martín Burt did, or at least keep his word of unity as Es­per­anza Martínez did? Fur­ther­more, Efrain and Soledad tri­umphed in the Con­certación’s in­ter­nal elec­tions with 348,873 votes, and four months later Payo Cubas ob­tained 692,663 votes, al­most twice as many votes as Efrain and Soledad. Cubas’ de­ci­sion to with­draw from the Con­certación is cu­ri­ous to say the least.

The change of speech is also strik­ing. In June 2022, when Payo jus­ti­fied his ab­sence at the sign­ing of the Con­certación agree­ment, he pointed out that “this trip to Ar­gentina was al­ready planned 15 days ago”, stress­ing that “from the first mo­ment he agreed with the Con­certación and that the pres­i­dent of Cruzada Na­cional was pre­sent at the sign­ing of the agree­ment”. Two months later, in a U-turn, Yolanda Pare­des in­di­cated that they were with­draw­ing from the Con­certación “which is un­der­mined by cor­rupt mem­bers and delin­quents”.

Any­one could be con­fused by the wide recog­ni­tion given to his can­di­dacy by the Ho­ra­cio Cartes’ me­dia group. Or, even, the ac­knowl­edge­ment made by the Gen­eral Rep­re­sen­ta­tive of the ANR when he pointed out that Payo Cubas “grows in what we gave him the op­por­tu­nity to grow…he grew be­cause we wanted him to”. But that is an­other de­bate.

Re­gard­ing the Con­certación, the At­las In­tel in­ter­na­tional poll pos­si­bly af­fected it neg­a­tively in the strat­egy of the last month and a half (see Graph 1 with the data of the pub­lished polls). Paraguayan polls were ab­solutely dis­cred­ited af­ter the 2018 em­bar­rass­ment. How­ever, At­las In­tel was com­ing in with a sig­nif­i­cant re­gional rep­u­ta­tion af­ter its work in Chile, Colom­bia, Ar­gentina and Brazil. If it did so well in the re­gional fore­cast, why chal­lenge its num­bers?

Graph 1. Evo­lu­tion of the main can­di­dates in the three At­las In­tel sur­veys.

Source: https://​www.at­las­in­tel.org/

The pre­dic­tion re­gard­ing Payo Cubas was ac­cu­rate; how­ever, that of the ANR and Con­certación was not. The Col­orados fi­nally ob­tained 10 points more than the last poll, and the Con­certación 5 points less. If one of the pur­poses of a poll is to pro­vide in­for­ma­tion for the par­ties and can­di­dates to make strate­gic de­ci­sions (for ex­am­ple, to make a pact or not with Payo a month be­fore the elec­tions), clearly the Con­certación was sail­ing in the blind. Such was the im­pact of the At­las In­tel sur­vey that the in­ter­na­tional me­dia echoed its fig­ures and some of them even ven­tured to sug­gest that an al­ter­na­tion was pos­si­ble.

There were also some prob­lem­atic fronts with which the Con­certación had to deal. First, Frente Guasú and Pa­tria Querida were not fully co­he­sive in their sup­port for the Ale­gre-Núñez duo. Sec­ond, Kattya González re­mained un­til the end in her di­alec­tic dis­pute against the PLRA, not par­tic­i­pat­ing in any cam­paign event of the pres­i­den­tial ticket. And third, the stroke that Fer­nando Lugo had in Au­gust 2022, which not only af­fected the Frente Guasú elec­torally, but also de­prived the Con­certación of a lead­er­ship with strong links with the most dis­ad­van­taged. Lu­go’s ab­sence co­in­cided with the loss with re­spect to 2018 of al­most 220,000 votes for the Frente Guasú’s Sen­ate list (and five fewer sen­a­tors), while, co­in­ci­den­tally, Cruzada Na­cional reaped around 270,000 more votes than in 2018 (and four more sen­a­tors).

These prob­lem­atic fronts of the Con­certación (es­pe­cially the lack of co­he­sion of its mem­bers) per­haps ex­plain Table 2. An im­por­tant leak of votes that the pres­i­den­tial for­mula had in con­trast with the votes for the Sen­ate that the can­di­dates sup­port­ing the Con­certación re­ceived.

Table 2. Po­ten­tial leak­age of votes by dif­fer­ence be­tween the Sen­ate and the Con­certación’s Pres­i­den­tial Duo

Source: https://​re­sul­ta­dos.tsje.gov.py/​pub­li­ca­cion/​di­vul­ga­cion.html

With­out this leak­age of votes, the re­sult would have been closer to the ANR (1,292,079 ver­sus 1,063,826), and Payo would have had a lower per­cent­age. The ex­pla­na­tions could be more abun­dant. In any case, the ANR con­tin­ues to lead by its hard vote, which works, if you will, in an in­er­tial way. The Col­orado votes be­tween 2018 and 2023 did not in­crease prac­ti­cally at all, even though the na­tional elec­toral roll did.

The first reading that the results suggest is that the division of the opposition into, at least, two big formulas (Concertación and Payo Cubas) favored the new Colorado triumph. It is clear that in politics mere mathematics does not work, but it is also evident that with high opposition dispersion there is no chance of winning against the ANR.

Graph 2. Com­par­i­son of the ANR pres­i­den­tial vote vs. the ANR in­ter­nal vote and the na­tional elec­toral roll (2013 to 2023)

Source: own based on TSJE and ANR data.

In the last five years, the ANR grew by only 82,012 more votes, al­though in per­cent­age terms that meant a de­crease, from the 46.4% ob­tained by Mario Abdo in 2018, to 42.7% ob­tained by San­ti­ago Peña in 2023. But it was enough for him again. And al­though it is true that they lost 4 per­cent­age points, the co­he­sion and the Col­orado hard vote re­mains un­scathed, at least since 2013, some­thing that does not hap­pen in the other spaces. That surely ex­plains the ap­peal to the merely in­tra-party vote with Peña vin­di­cat­ing dic­ta­tor Stroess­ner or propos­ing to Col­oradize the civil ser­vice. This agenda that has been re­peated since Cartes might seem anachro­nis­tic, if you will, to a non-Col­orado. But it clearly works for them.

In any case, the ANR was not a for­mula for change, even if one would like to in­sin­u­ate the con­trary. One thing is the pow­er­ful in­ter­nal Col­orado dy­nam­ics, in which two fac­tions dis­pute power and al­ter­nate gov­ern­ments. But an­other is to say that the ANR was also a change, a change of what? From Nicanor to Cartes there were, yes, changes of ideas and men; from Cartes to this part, pure con­ti­nu­ities. Not only are they prac­ti­cally the same peo­ple, but also the same gov­ern­ment pro­gram. But, once again, that is an­other de­bate. Al­though it is good to clar­ify to pre­vent the un­wary.

As long as the op­po­si­tions -in plural- con­tinue pri­or­i­tiz­ing the in­di­vid­ual agenda, there is Col­oradismo for a while. More­over, the “Blame Game” is fu­tile in this in­stance. We must look at this fail­ure as a learn­ing ex­er­cise for the fu­ture. An­other is­sue is the al­leged fraud, whose protests led to the im­pris­on­ment of Payo Cubas, al­though we will have time to dis­cuss it.

Cover im­age: So­cial Net­works of Efrain Ale­gre.