MIT-Harvard Public Disputes Program Associate Nelson Espinal Baéz warns the higher echelons of the Modern Revolutionary Party (PRM) that they would be making a big mistake if they back constitutional reform to enable President Danilo Medina to run again in 2024. The Medina administration also seeks to unify the municipal, congressional and presidential elections, a change that also requires a constitutional amendment.
Writing in Diario Libre opinion page on 31 July 2019, Espinal Báez says that if the PRM backs the rehabilitation of President Danilo Medina for 2024, the party is risking a repeat of what the PLD did with the PRD in 2009, the so-called “Blue Ties Pact”. At the time, he recalls the opposition party, represented by engineer Miguel Vargas, “naively agreed with President Leonel Fernández the constitutional reform of 2010.” He said that reform brought with it “a poisoned gift for Vargas and for the PLD itself: The rehabilitation of Hipólito Mejía within his party and the habilitation of Fernández, after the end of his term of office in 2012.”
“To try to rehabilitate Danilo Medina is to try to give the PLD its own medicine. But the strategy is not bi-univocal. What works for one in certain circumstances does not necessarily work for the other in reverse and in different circumstances. There are variables. The strategy involves mathematics, but the results are not exactly mathematics,” writes the negotiations expert.
He warns that the PRM source of power is not exclusively what it can or cannot influence within a part of the PLD, but how much it can influence people to vote for the party. The people, he stresses, do not want constitutional reform and do not want more tensions or national solutions to internal conflicts of the PLD, he writes. The people want the basic problems of the country to be solved, he states.
He warns that in politics, objectives are not found, they are defined and never lost sight of. “The fact that the PLD is divided is not an objective, it is a means. Moreover, you cannot set yourself an objective that your opponents can redefine or that you cannot control,” he writes.
He warns the PRM to not touch the Constitution. That the three leaders with a caudillista vocation (Leonel, Hipólito and Danilo) may end their historical cycle mentoring leaders with statement vocations, he writes.
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Diario Libre
1 August 2019