Opinion Sur Joven

A few nights ago, I went to the movies with my girlfriend. I wanted to see an action movie. She preferred a comedy. I don’t mind watching comedies. She doesn’t like action movies. The last time we had been to the movies, we had watched one I had chosen, so this time she got to choose one. Next time I’ll choose.

A few days ago, I met my friends and we ordered pizza. I wanted a cheese pizza; Andy wanted pizza Margherita. The rest didn’t mind having one or the other. We ordered half and half, end of story.

A couple days ago, a friend of mine asked for a raise at work. He wanted a twenty percent raise. His boss told him the company was going through a difficult period due to the crisis, and that he was willing to give him a ten percent raise. My friend wasn’t satisfied, so they started analyzing other options. Thus they found out that, since the company was having lower sales and production levels, my friend’s working hours could be reduced. The raise he got is lower than he’d expected, but now he only works six hours a day and has more free time.

Reaching an agreement

Our everyday lives demand agreements all the time. Any civilized society is based on implicit or explicit agreements that enable human beings cohabit in peace. Couples, friends, companies and organizations, among others, can only work when the members of those “partnerships” have the ability to negotiate. When that’s not possible, what used to keep those partners together disappears or breaks up.

Argentina has just gone through a new electoral process. And, notwithstanding the result, I dare to say it was the poorest and emptiest campaign in terms of proposals since 1983. Not a single idea was discussed. Only a small debate on having the State control public companies was held by the end of the campaign. The rest of it was just a series of discussions on topics only political scientists care about: testimonial candidacies, politicians leaving the positions they were elected for, district changes… And all this generated a lot of confusion among already confused citizens.

A few days before the elections, I was invited to explain Argentina’s electoral situation in several social organizations. Each meeting was attended by approximately thirty people. Before I’d start my lecture, I’d ask the people who believed they knew what positions we would be voting for to raise their hands. To avoid making them feel embarrassed, I’d first tell them I didn’t care whether they knew it or not, that I wouldn’t judge them and that I only wanted them to tell me whether they thought they knew what these elections were about. Only in one of the meetings did half the attendees raise their hands; in the rest, only two or three hands would stand in the air. Therefore, people didn’t know we would be voting for congress members. Not withstanding my perception, a survey conducted by Universidad de Belgrano ten days before the election revealed that 46 percent of the voters in the city of Buenos Aires weren’t able to mention more than one candidate.

But… Why all this confusion? Are all these citizens ignorant? Maybe that’s one of the answers, but once I was told by a teacher that if 25 students fail in a class of 30, it’s not a problem of the students, but the teacher’s. In this case, if most people are confused about the candidates and the positions they’re running for, there isn’t a problem with the people but with the system.

Spaces and ideas

A while ago I wrote that Argentina needs to strengthen its political parties. And I believe that, now that the elections are over, the facts prove said necessity again: politicians should stop playing solitaire and start working in teams. As I’ve mentioned before, living in a society necessarily implies reaching an agreement with each other. In our everyday lives, we’re always negotiating something. But this seems to be impossible in Argentine politics, not only between opposite candidates but also between those who claim to share the same ideas. Even allies are distanced; there seems to be an abyss between all and each of them. There’s nothing, absolutely nothing they agree upon.

Today, Argentine politics isn’t about ideas, but of personal likes and dislikes. And that makes it even more difficult to create a space that transcends a particular person.

But are politicians to blame for all this? Partly they are, because they’re responsible for managing the public issues, the things concerning everyone. But, as I’ve said before, when no one is able to pass an exam, it’s probably not the students’ fault, but the teacher’s or the evaluation method’s.

Let’s go back to the system. Perhaps we need some changes to encourage people to gather in political parties, and discourage the creation of personal spaces.

We don’t need extreme changes as some politicians proposed in 2001, but small methodological changes: if citizens don’t know what positions they’ll be voting for, they can hardly legitimize the system.

Small changes

What changes should we propose? First, we should stop uncontrolled changes of district to avoid that candidates -only because they are doing well at the polls- move from one province to another one to obtain a position. That will allow new candidates to emerge.

We should forbid candidates to “jump” from one position to another; or, at least, forbid them to go from executive positions to legislative ones. By now, it’s almost become a common habit that deputy officers leave the positions they were voted for to run for a different one.

Limiting the participation of ministers as candidates in another urgent necessity. Or they should at least quit before the beginning of the campaign. I don’t think a person who spends twenty hours a day working in their campaign is able to manage their area.

But, talking about strengthening political parties, an even bigger problem appears. Today, a never-ending list of Argentine candidates claim to be Peronists and are members of the Justicialist Party, but then -since they don’t fit into the list of their party- they borrow a party name from some friend and run as candidates within a space they don’t belong to. Thus, in our country we have accepted that anyone can be a candidate, even if they don’t have a party. But how can we avoid this? Very simple. By forbidding politicians who are not members of the political spaces they’re representing from running for the elections. That’s how we could end this problem of having more than one candidate by party and defining the primaries of the political parties during the general elections.

The way we vote need some changes too. Promoting the use of the single ballot model or electronic voting could stop some hideous practices and eliminate the confusion created by the closed list system (“listas sábana”). (For more information, click here).

Together is better

Ultimately, all these measures would strengthen political parties and discourage the personalization of politics. Citizens would have a clear notion of the political spaces participating in the elections, thus not having to learn hundreds of names of candidates who in two years or so end up disappearing from the political and electoral map.

Most of these ideas weren’t born in my worn-out mind, but they’ve already been submitted to the Congress. Now it’s just a matter of discussing them.

Living in a society implies reaching agreements. If we don’t, our country will hardly grow and improve. This doesn’t mean we have to lose our own ideas, but we have to work to make them come true: we should convince the other that what we’re proposing is better, instead of imposing it. With these changes, not only will we live more peacefully, but we will be able to make them last longer. Otherwise, the next government will destroy all the current one has achieved, and so on.

Is this Utopian? I don’t think so. While here in Argentina we were going through elections to choose candidates with doubtful proposals and vague ideas, our fellow country men in Uruguay were going through an unprecedented open primary election process where the solid Uruguayan political parties defined their presidential candidates. Once the elections were over, the losers offered their full collaboration to those who won. That would be a good model for Argentina. And it’s right here in Latin America.

Illustration: Hernán Pitarque

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