Parties rush the search for alliances to avoid fragmentation of the vote

On Sunday, August 23, the deadline established by the National Electoral Council (CNE ) was fulfilled for the political parties and movements to define, in internal elections, the candidates for the Presidency and Vice-presidency .

Parties rush the search for alliances to avoid fragmentation of the vote

That weekend, each political store experienced an intense bustle to specify their options or decide on alliances with other organizations. The result: a total of 20 candidates were announced through the media.

Although the figure caught the attention of Ecuadorians, that number is not definitive; since until September 17 (the deadline set by the electoral body to close the registrations) the political actors will seek to reach agreements, be they programmatic or temporary , to unite before the electoral fight for next year.

Guillermo Lasso (CREO) has already announced his willingness to dialogue, to build bridges with other organizations to form an alliance of unity, with defined programmatic bases that lead to a single objective, which is economic recovery .

This was stated after registering his candidacy in the CNE, in recent days. ” I have no problem talking with the leader of the PSC, Jaime Nebot, ” he said on that occasion. Then he ratified that opening with other trends. ” I do not rule out the possibility of a dialogue , I raised it in October 2019, when Ecuador was experiencing a critical situation due to the Correa uprising …”, he expressed in the media.

Meanwhile, the PSC candidate, Cristina Reyes , also maintained her willingness to dialogue, but that her candidacy was firm , a fact that was corroborated by the former mayor of Guayaquil, Jaime Nebot .

In another political store there have been similar pronouncements. For example, César Montúfar, from the Concertación-Socialist Party alliance, also expressed his willingness to unite tendencies, except with Correísmo. To this end, he was willing to give up his candidacy for the sake of an alliance that avoids the fragmentation of the vote. This alliance was formed with a programmatic postulate.

His words were ratified in a statement issued by the Concertación movement: “From the consent of the forces that support me, I am willing to decline my candidacy for the Presidency of the Republic , based on a great national agreement of honest Ecuador.”

And he added that this opens a space for dialogue “with all the candidates who, likewise, decline their aspirations to achieve a unified option for the future of Ecuador, avoiding electoral fragmentation and closing the way to organized crime .”

Regarding the rest of the candidates, definitive pronouncements have not yet been made in the sense of ratifying or declining positions, in order to unite trends or at least, to initiate a route of dialogues that lead to this end.

For the political analyst, Julio Echeverría , it is normal that an electoral process initially presents a very wide range of political actors that even a possible fragmentation of voters and the vote can be presumed.

However, he considers that as time progresses, this apparent fragmentation can be reduced through calls for dialogues to unite tendencies, which bring together actors; and more than actors unite programmatic positions because the electorate needs to decide their vote.

“We hope that in the next electoral event the candidacies will be defined and three or four great ideological and programmatic currents will be seen , so that the public is oriented in a better way,” he adds.

And it is that he observes a current scenario that does not benefit the voter, because with a ballot (tentative) of 20 actors , in which almost all say the same, the possibility of choosing becomes more difficult and that confuses the citizen who will focus more on the sense of opting for the personal figure, rather than the ideas that the candidate promotes.

Beyond the need or not to establish alliances, Echeverría reveals a detail: the number of pre-candidates denotes a crisis of representation , of the parties and of the political system in general.

” Politics and parties become electoral agencies where the candidates arrive and are inscribed on the list with the expectation that if they come to power, it is to improve their material conditions and they do not necessarily do so thinking about the country or the future of the country. country ”, he warns.

Therefore, he considers that there is a fall in the ethical content of politics , which is serious in his opinion, since phenomena such as caudillismo and populism emerge, often ending in corruption.

For his part, the analyst Santiago Basabe, considers that what is desirable is that alliances are produced and that these are programmatic , that is, between political sectors that have similar ideas; ” Unfortunately that is not so easy to find in the middle , so although some political organizations may have ideas approaches, there will be others purely temporary, that is, for now.”

As an example of the first, he cites the case of the CREO and PSC parties where there is indeed an ideological closeness between the two , despite their distances that are the product of another interest, but that in general are part of a center-right and market economy, with conservative tendencies .

But in the general context, he adds, as there is so much information available (in relation to the number of candidates), the possibility of a better choice is complicated, since the citizen has so many options that he becomes saturated with the risk that he ends up choosing in the very moment of the election by a candidate, without the correct reasoning about which candidate or proposal is the most convenient.

https://www.eltelegrafo.com.ec/noticias/politica/3/partidos-busqueda-allaciones-fragmentacion-voto