The dean of the PUCMM Law School, Flavio Dario Espinal, analyzes the reasons behind President Hipolito Mejia?s defeat in the 2004 Presidential election. While highlighting that the supporters of Mejia lost their sense of reality and political perspective after a majority win in elections of 2000 and 2002, Espinal believes the Mejia?s followers were convinced of their victory. He looks into the reasons for the defeat in his column in today?s edition of El Caribe and says the main cause was the economic crisis that galvanized voters against the re-election of Mejia. But there were major political reasons, also. He explains that the PPH faction that supported Mejia?s candidacy gave little value to submitting the traditional anti-re-election doctrine of the PRD to a plebiscite within the party. It also erred in thinking that a makeshift primary to elect the Presidential candidate was enough to validate their re-election plan.
Espinal takes his analysis further when he mentions that the PPH lost perspective in its massive and systematic use of the state resources, ignoring that, in times of crisis, such open clientelistic policies end up irritating most of the rest of the population. Likewise, the same negative effect was generated by the saturation of government-controlled media, including those confiscated from Baninter, for a re-election campaign that was waged on the airwaves through the very day of the election. And the same occurred with the dirty war whose last effort was the staging of a supposed telephone conversation that sought to present Fernandez as the author of a grand conspiracy against national stability and financial security. ?People, nevertheless, knew better and let it be known on 16 May,? concludes Espinal.