Headlines over the weekend focused on talks within the Dominican Liberation Party (PLD) to make room for 50,000 PLD party members on the government payroll from now to December. As reported in the Listin Diario, President Leonel Fernandez met with Lidio Cadet and Cristina Lizardo of the PLD’s jobs commission to discuss the need to fill posts with PLD members. Cadet said the PLD members want to replace PRD members who still hold jobs within the government.
Senator Ramon Alburquerque (PRD Monte Plata) said that if the PLD plans to remove 50,000 PRD members from government jobs he believes it is because they understand they do not need the support of the PRD members in Congress and will govern by issuing decrees. “Then the time of confrontation will begin over what we thought were matters of the past,” he told Hoy newspaper.
Meanwhile, as reported in Hoy newspaper today, economists Eduardo Tejera and Fernando Alvarez Bogaert (a former minister of finance under President Hipolito Mejia) said that the goal to create 50,000 new jobs in government is incompatible with the fiscal deficit of the country and the need to continue reducing government spending. Tejera said the only way to create jobs is through productive works, and not in bureaucratic posts. Alvarez Bogaert said that the government has enjoyed a reduction in the fiscal deficit due to the peso’s appreciation on the exchange market and the increase in government collections, but that it is still necessary to limit government jobs in order to move forward with the IMF agreement.
Guillermo Caram of the PRSC called on the national community to be vigilant so that government spending is not again expanded. “If that [expansion] is implemented then no one should dare dream of agreements with the IMF in the short term.”
Diario Libre reports that sources from the Presidential Palace indicated that the government last week held back hundreds of checks to government employees who received wages from more than one governmental department.