In 2015, Medina followers pushed through a constitutional amendment so the President could run for reelection in the 2016 election. Polls back in 2015 were favorable to his doing so. But in 2019, the situation is different. Three leading polls, Asisa Research (71%), Gallup-Hoy (68%) and Mark Penn (61%), indicate the Dominican people are against amending the Constitution for a second time so that Medina can run again. This would be the first time a President pushes through two amendments in order to enable presidential aspirations.
Time may be running out for President Danilo Medina to announce if he will seek the second reelection. Political analyst Juan Bolívar Díaz writes that in order to register the candidacy of Medina, the first step is to amend the Constitution. The 2015 Constitution bans Medina from running again in 2020. The transitory clause in the 2015 Constitution establishes: “In the case that the President of the Republic corresponding to the constitutional period 2012-2016 is the candidate to the same position for the constitutional period 2016-2020 he will not be able to run for the next period nor for any other period, nor for the vice presidency of the republic, either.”
If a constitutional amendment is achieved, then Medina needs to be registered by his party and presented as a pre-candidate by the Central Committee of the PLD. The deadline to register the pre-candidates for the primary is 23 August 2019. The primary is scheduled for 6 October 2019. Pre-candidate campaigning is officially open on 1 July 2019.
Polls show that President Danilo Medina is the highest ranked PLD politician. But his main opposition is from within the party. The president of the PLD, former President Leonel Fernández wants to return to power. The same 2015 Constitution that enabled Medina to run for President again made it possible for Fernández to run in 2020. If elected, Fernández could even aspire to a second term.
Last week, the deputies of the largest opposition party, the PRM, and those of Fernández signed a document where they pledged to oppose the constitutional amendment. PRM leaders have been traveling to Washington, D.C. to lobby for US support against a change of the Constitution.
Juan Bolívar Diaz writes in Acento: “Nobody is unaware that President Medina does not have a consensus even in his own party, much less in the rest of society, to attempt the second consecutive re-election, nor [does he have] the two thirds of the votes of the National Assembly necessary to reform the Constitution, and that to achieve them he would have to use the economic and political power of the state, to the detriment of the institutionality of the parties and of democracy itself.”
Díaz recalls that the risks are high for President Danilo Medina, both for himself and the party if he were to attempt to do “what has never been done”, to take from the successful campaign slogan with which he ran for President in 2012. Diaz observes that deputies of his own party, Juan Comprés, Carlos Quiñonez, and Demóstenes Martínez have reminded Medina that he himself had drafted the temporary clause that bans him from running in 2020 and the never again clause.
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Acento
21 May 2019