The electoral reform bill presently under study in the Chamber of Deputies would allow those who oppose President Mejia’s PRD candidacy to also run on the PRD ticket. But political observers say that if the leading three contenders – Milagros Ortiz Bosch, Rafael Subervi Bonilla and Enmanuel Esquea – go along with the bill they had supported, they would be the big losers, as the bill stipulates that all votes for same-party candidates would be given to the one who fares the best on election day, which could be President Hipolito Mejia. El Caribe reports the comments of Deputy Francisco Soliman of the Subervi faction of the PRD, who accused his colleague, Deputy Ramon Agramonte of the PPH faction. “We were tricked, the convention stands and the Ley de Lemas (electoral reform bill) was nothing but a smoke screen,” he is quoted as saying yesterday in Congress. Soliman furthermore told the press that the PPH plan is to take over the PRD, placing Vicente Sanchez Baret as president and Guido Gomez Mazara as secretary general, once Congress convenes to pass the electoral reform bill under the guise that it needs a session to pass the financial risk bill to comply with the IMF.
Also contemplated in the electoral reform bill presently in the Chamber of Deputies for study are provisions that would enable President Mejia to legalize his candidacy without the signatures of the PRD president (Hatuey Decamps) and secretary general (Rafael Subervi Bonilla). Decamps gave no credence to the 18 January primary, saying, “The staging of that primary was a true electoral farce, totally illegitimate from top to bottom, nobody validated it, and now the voters that were not there will appear,” he said.
El Caribe reports that President Mejia called a meeting of PRD leaders the day after winning the PRD primary. The meeting sought to garner support for the electoral reform bill that is overwhelmingly being rejected by opposition parties, the civic society, the population in general and even by judges of the JCE. But the leading three contenders, Ortiz, Subervi and Esquea, did not attend the meeting that was held at the house of Peggy Cabral, president of the organizing committee of the 18 January primary. The president of the Chamber of Deputies, Alfredo Pacheco, and the head of the Senate, Jesus Vasquez, both PRD party members, did attend. The co-ordinator for the PPH faction of the PRD that supports President Mejia aspirations to be re-elected, Eligio Jaquez, told journalists that even if there has been opposition to the bill, they should remember that “the PRD is the half of the population.”