After the electoral dismemberment, it is crucial that the parties re-establish themselves

Faced with the results of the recent elections, the opposition parties have accepted the defeat and must reinvent themselves in the face of increasingly obvious decline.

The February 28 legislative elections reconfigured the political map of El Salvador and left the traditional parties: ARENA and FMLN with a decrease in the flow of votes of up to 79% compared to the last elections.

FMLN, for example, peaked in 2009 when it reached over 900,000, but then in 2012 began to decline and it was in 2018 when it suffered the most resounding decline, falling to 175,000 votes.

In light of these results, on March 1, Óscar Ortiz, Secretary General of the FMLN, acknowledged that the election results were increasingly unfavorable and that it had been an “irreversible trend” since 2015.

You can consult: The result of the 2021 elections for mayors and deputies

Faced with this latest coup, the ephemeral leader warned that they would change the statutes and redesign the left party according to the current moment.

FMLN since its first participation in the elections in 1994 was in effervescence, on that occasion they obtained 21 seats, managed to be the second Salvadoran political force, where in the second participation in the 1997 elections it obtained an important quota of legislative and municipal power and, until 2006, had 32 legislators in the Legislative Assembly until they ruled for 10 years.

As for ARENA, the decrease was smaller, but it also lost votes. For example, in 2018 it counted over 800,000 votes, but this 28F dropped to 295,000 votes.

In view of this, the tricolor party has stated that it is aware that the results of the last elections are not favorable to them and attributes it to the fact that the country has concentrated more power in

Executive, but acknowledges that they will make changes in the party to “responsibly” seek new forms of communication with the population to listen to their needs.

Eduardo Escobar, the executive director of Acción Ciudadana, believes that the opposition parties have acknowledged their defeat and are talking about reforms in their institutional framework, but it has not been heard that the leaders will leave their positions. “It’s a question that should have been mentioned and should have been asked,” he explains.

“(The parties should) set up a transitional commission so that it can conduct a process of institutional rearrangement and analysis, because otherwise what will happen is what has always happened after an electoral defeat, that the parties that only make “cosmetic adjustments”, there is no depth in the direction of the party, it seems that changes are being made “, says Escobar.

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He indicates that he has not heard from the opposition parties a real and strong recognition of their responsibility for the situation they live in, where, instead, he has heard voices blaming third parties for what happened and not accept the forced responsibility for the mismanagement they have done.

Escobar comments that, even in his analysis, the parties have selected civil society organizations or the Constitutional Chamber for what happened in the elections, when in reality they are the results of poor management of the parties over several years.

“I think that if the leaders continue and make some cosmetic changes there, what they will show us is that they have not learned anything and they have not understood anything. I would be seriously inclined to believe that the parties have not yet understood, they have not understood the message that the people have said. This should not only be seen as a situation of how to make an analysis of the internal conditions of the party, but should include in this analysis changes and evaluations of what people think “, says Escobar.

Carlos Mauricio Hernández, a professor in the Department of Philosophy at José Simeón Cañas Central American University, said in an interview with Infobae that “the fundamental reason for this change in electoral preferences is due to the fact that both ARENA and FMLN failed in a scandalous way in all the three great flags that mark the Salvadoran electorate: bread, peace and work ”.

He added that “neither in the 20 years of right-wing governments nor in the ten years of the left has a society been built in which the majority have decent living conditions, security or jobs with fair wages. It is no coincidence that FMLN almost disappears “.

Read also: Which ARENA deputies have not been re-elected?

In addition, researcher Jeannette Aguilar, also consulted by Infobae, added another ingredient that influenced the sharp drop in votes for opposition parties: Nayib Bukele’s campaign.

“To his electoral strategy of capitalizing on satiety with traditional parties was added a massive and millionaire advertising marketing campaign, along with the open and scandalous use of the government apparatus to proselytize in favor of his party, which did not give margin to competition and did on the rest of the invisible competitors “, explained Aguilar.

Parties in decline or in need of recasting

Eduardo Escobar says that in this case, it is necessary to enter into an analysis of brands that talk about parties such as ARENA, FMLN, PCN and PDC, as if he were talking about a commercial problem, as an example, in which a product can be very good, but if it comes from a bad brand, it will not increase product sales, “we do not know if the political brands of ARENA and FMLN can still be rebuilt, oxygenated and still valid, this is part of what political parties need to do, they have to do the analysis if the brand can still sell, to be viable as an option for the electorate ”, he explains.

He comments that if the brand no longer has support for reappearance, no matter how many investments or changes it makes, it will not grow. Not only does he have to do this analysis within the parties, but he also has to take to the streets, to the population and ask how much there is a chance for people to believe again in these “political brands” and be a “no” of the population, the party. it can be changed over time with different actions or it can certainly not continue.

When it comes to thinking about re-founding parties, in the case of the FMLN party, not only does it have to think about recreating a left-wing party or, in the case of parties known as the right, the question is first and foremost to know “whether its citizens occupy still the ideological location as a form of positioning ”, if the electorate no longer sees that it identifies with the left or the right.

You can read: FMLN started losing voters in 2009 and ARENA in 2021

“People no longer position themselves as I am on the left or I am on the right, so they also appear with a left-wing party, this is doomed to failure. First you have to see if people still position themselves in these left or right terms and if people use these categories, they should see the target population they could have, ”he says.

He adds that if the new parties are re-established, they must witness the reality that they must raise their proposal based on the thinking of the population, to observe more what they are looking for to improve them, whether they are laws, forms and styles. of life. .

“It seems that these parties have not adapted to the new times, this does not mean that they set aside their principles and values, but that they have to adapt them to new generations and new realities, such as the remaining trademarks. depending on the criteria, people’s perception and desires for their product and that is why they remain among the population’s preference, and those who failed to adapt were lost “, he explains.

He comments that if political parties fail to connect with the logic and desires of citizens, then they remain “frozen in time” and talk to an electorate that does not exist, do not talk to those who are going to vote, and This assumes that is what which the political parties did not understand, this also in accordance with the statements made by the political analyst Álvaro Artiga, who mentions that there is a “generational change” that strikes the traditional parties. “Our parties have spoken to an electorate that no longer exists, that’s what happened,” says Escobar.

The decline of the ruling parties

PDC President Rodolfo Parker acknowledged the results of the March 2 election, a party founded in 1960, where his role will always be to seek the common good, his leader said.

Regarding whether there will be changes in the party, Parker said that “every political party has an imperative duty to respond to the times, in a healthy combination of what is the experience with a guarantee of renewal.”

As for the PCN party, which was a strong political institute at the same time in the 1960s, and which until 1979 administered several governments, has so far made no official statements as to whether there will be changes to could maintain over time.

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Eduardo Escobar mentions that these traditional parties had their apogee. “Patience was exhausted (for the population) they gave him the ARENA space because they did not trust the FMLN, then they broke that barrier, they gave power to the FMLN, they ratified it in the next elections, but they saw that they did not they changed their living conditions, they saw that the government leadership did not bring them benefits, they said that then it is no more, their patience has been exhausted “, he says.

He adds that with the current government, we will have to see if the same phenomenon happens, if the population believed, supported, but is not given an incomplete check, it is to see if citizenship does so based on experience with previous governments. other parties.

“I think that, with the former president (Antonio) Saca, the population did not give an empty check to ARENA, with (Salvador) Sánchez Cerén he did not give an empty check to FMLN, because of his degree of disrespect and dissatisfaction when he was there , it was no longer what we do, people will end up voting for us and it doesn’t look like that “, explains Escobar.

He explains that in the case of New Ideas and President Nayib Bukele, they are not talking to the population about ideologies, which they have made clear, and the key that the Salvadoran president has used before the population has been “removing the corrupt to give back what was stolen. ”He did not talk about being left or right.