After electoral disaster it is crucial that parties make their refoundation

Faced with the results of the recent elections, the opposition parties have accepted defeat and must re-engineer in the face of the increasingly obvious decline.

The legislative elections of February 28 reconfigured the political map in El Salvador and have left the traditional parties: ARENA and FMLN with a drop in their turnout to 79% compared to the last election.

The FMLN, for example, reached its peak in 2009 when it reached more than 900,000, but then in 2012 it began to fall and it was in 2018 when it suffered its sharpest decline as it dropped to 175,000 votes.

In light of these results, on March 1, Óscar Ortiz, Secretary General of the FMLN, acknowledged that the election results were increasingly unfavorable and had been “an irreversible trend” since 2015.

You can consult: Result of Elections 2021 for Mayors and deputies

Faced with this latest blow, the efemelenista leader warned that they would change the statutes and do a reengineering in the left-wing party according to the present.

The FMLN since its first participation in elections of country in 1994 was in effervescence, in this occasion obtained 21 seats, managed to be the second Salvadoran political force, where in its second participation in elections in 1997 obtained an important quota of legislative and municipal power and already for the 2006 they got to have 32 legislators in the Legislative Assembly until arriving to be 10 years in the government.

On the ARENA side, the fall has been smaller, but it has also been losing votes. For example, in 2018 it counted more than 800,000 votes but this 28F dropped to 295,000 votes.

Faced with this, the tricolor party has stated that it is aware that the results of the last elections are not favorable to them and attributes this to the fact that the country has concentrated more power in the

Executive, but admits that they will make changes in the party to “in a responsible way” seek new forms of communication with the population to listen to their needs.

Eduardo Escobar, executive director of Citizen Action, is of the opinion that the opposition parties have acknowledged his defeat and are talking about reforms to its institutionalization, but it has not been heard that the leaders will leave office. “It’s an issue that had to be mentioned and had to be done,” he explains.

“(The parties must) establish a transitional commission so that it is the one that directs a process of institutional readjustment and analysis, because if not what will happen is what has always happened after an electoral defeat, that the parties they just make “cosmetic adjustments,” there’s no depth on the course of the match, it makes it look like changes are being made, ”Escobar says.

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He points out that he has not heard from the opposition parties a real and strong recognition of their responsibility for the situation they are living in, where instead he has heard voices blaming third parties for what has happened and do not accept a strong responsibility. of the mismanagement they have done.

Escobar comments that even in his analysis, the parties have pointed to civil society organizations or the Constitutional Chamber for what has happened in the elections, when in fact they are the results of mismanagement by the parties. matches for many years.

“I think if the leaders go on and make a couple of cosmetic changes out there, what they’re going to show us is that they didn’t learn anything and they didn’t understand anything. I would be seriously inclined to think that the parties have not yet understood, they have not captured the message that the people have told them.This should not be seen only as a situation of how to make an analysis of the internal conditions of the party, but should include in this analysis changes and evaluation of what people are thinking, ”Escobar says.

Carlos Maurici Hernández, professor of the Department of Philosophy at the Central American University José Simeón Cañas, said in an interview with Infobae that “the fundamental reason for this change in electoral preferences is due to the fact that both ARENA and the FMLN failed in a scandalous way in the three great flags that mark to the Salvadoran electorate: bread, peace and work “.

He added that “neither in the 20 years of right-wing governments nor in the ten years of the left was a society achieved where the majorities had decent living conditions, security or jobs with fair wages. It is no coincidence that the FMLN is almost to disappear “.

Also read: Which ARENA deputies were no longer re-elected?

In addition, researcher Jeannette Aguilar, also consulted by Infobae, added another ingredient that affected the sharp drop in votes for opposition parties: the Nayib Bukele campaign.

“To his electoral strategy of capitalizing on fatigue with traditional parties was added a massive and millionaire advertising marketing campaign, alongside the open and scandalous use of the government apparatus to proselytize in favor of his party, the that it did not give margin to the competition and made invisible to the rest of the contenders “, explained Aguilar.

Matches in decline or need for refoundation

Eduardo Escobar says that in this case it is necessary to enter into an analysis of brands talking about parties like SAND, FMLN, PCN and PDC as if they were talking about a commercial issue, as an example, where a product can be very good, but if it’s from a bad brand it’s not going to increase product sales, “we don’t know if the political brands of ARENA and the FMLN can still be rebuilt, oxygenated and still in force, that’s part of what they have to do the political parties, they have to do the analysis if the brand can still sell, be viable as an option for the electorate, ”he explains.

He comments that if this brand no longer has support for it to resurface, no matter how many investments or changes it makes it will not stand up. This analysis should not only be done within the parties, but to take to the streets, to the population and ask how likely it is that people will believe in these “political brands” again, and whether the party will be a “no” of the population. it can change over time with different actions or definitely no longer continue.

When it comes to thinking about re-founding parties, in the case of the FMLN party you don’t just have to think about re-creating a left-wing party, or in the case of parties known as right-wing parties, it’s a matter of first knowing “whether citizens still occupy ideological location as a form of positioning, ”if the electorate is no longer seeing that they identify with the left or the right.

You can read: The FMLN started losing voters since 2009 and ARENA this 2021

“People are no longer positioned as I am on the left or I am on the right, then and they show up with a left party, this is doomed to fail. You have to go see first if people are still positioned in these left or right terms and if people use these categories they should see the target population they could have, ”he opines.

He adds that to refound new parties must also address the reality that they must raise their proposal based on the thinking of the population, to observe more what it seeks to improve, whether laws, forms and lifestyles.

“It seems that these parties have not adjusted to the new times, this does not mean that they should set aside their principles and values ​​but should adjust it to the new generations and new realities, such as the brands that to stay they are adjusting according to the criteria, the perception and the desires of the people to their product, and for that reason they stay between the preference of the population, and those that did not manage to adapt were lost ”, it explains.

He says that if political parties fail to connect with the logic and desires of the citizenry then they are “frozen in time” and are talking to an electorate that does not exist, they are not talking to those who are going to vote, and that it is supposed to be what the political parties have not understood, this also according to statements given by the political analyst Álvaro Artiga, who mentions that there is a “generational change” that is hitting the traditional parties. “Our parties spoke to an electorate that no longer exists, that’s what happened,” Escobar says.

Decline of the parties that were in power

The president of the PDC, Rodolfo Parker, on March 2 last recognized the results of the elections, a party founded in the 1960s, where its role will always be to seek the common good, its leader said.

As for whether there will be changes in the party, Parker stated that “every political party has an urgent duty to respond to the times, in a healthy combination of what is experience with a guarantee of renewal.”

As for the PCN party, which was a strong political institute at the same time in the 1960s, and which until 1979 administered several governments, so far has not given official statements on whether there will be changes to stay in the weather.

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Eduardo Escobar mentions that these traditional parties had their heyday. “Patience ran out (the population) they gave the space to ARENA because they did not have confidence in the FMLN, then they broke that barrier, they gave the power to the FMLN, they ratified it in the next election, but they saw that they did not change their living conditions, they saw that the government management did not benefit them, they said then no more, their patience was running out “, he comments.

He adds that with the current government it will be to see if this same phenomenon happens, where the population believed, supported but is not being given a blank check, it is to see if the citizens act like this after the experience with previous governments of other parties.

“I think that already with the ex-president (Antoni) Treu, the population no longer gave a blank check to ARENA, with (Salvador) Sánchez Cerén he did not give a blank check to the FMLN, because already the degree of non-compliance and dissatisfaction was there, then, we were no longer doing what we do people are going to end up voting for us, and this cannot be seen as such “, explains Escobar.

He explains that in the case of New Ideas and President Nayib Bukele they do not speak to the population of ideologies, which they have made clear, and the key that the Salvadoran president used in front of the population was “to remove the corrupt for them to return the stolen, “he did not speak of being left or right.