The dean of the PUCMM university’s law school in Santo Domingo, Flavio Dario Espinal, writes today on El Caribe’s opinion page on how the ruling PRD party has structured its own kind of populism as a propagandistic answer to the economic crisis. For the government, this is about dividing society between “the powerful” and “the poor,” he writes and points out that the government has insisted on blaming the business sector for the economy’s breakdown, painting the business sector as speculator, tax evader and insensitive to the people’s problems. By contrast, the authorities are promoting the perception that they represent the “true” interests of the masses. This redemptory form of speech seeks to validate the justness of the government’s cause versus the mercurial interests of the business sectors that take advantage of the crisis. Espinal, a former Dominican ambassador to the OAS, writes that the government has turned this into a case of the rich against the poor, the haves and the have-nots, the good and the bad. “Not that we want to ignore the great inequalities in Dominican society, but this type of populist talk will not take Dominican society very far, as shown by the experience in other countries,” he says. Espinal concludes: “Of course this type of talk has proven to be politically effective in certain cases, usually when the opposition uses such talk to exert pressure on those in power – not when it is the talk assumed by those in government who have an evident quota of responsibility in the crisis that they want to exclusively blame others for.” The writer can be reached for comments at fdespinal@codetel.net.do