Carlos Pineda, until recently the candidate for the Presidency of Guatemala with the highest intention of voting, expressed his surprise that the party for which he was running, Prosperidad Ciudadana, desisted from supporting him in his appeal to the Constitutional Court.
Without hiding his frustration at being left out of the elections on June 25 due to a court ruling, he said he did not know "what the party was playing." The presidential candidate insisted that he always said he was not part of the party and that he did not understand the behavior of its members.
The relations between leadership and parties are an old issue in politics that is exacerbated in presidential regimes.
The direct presidential election made by citizens blurs the intermediary role played by parties in parliamentary regimes which, however, remains solidly in other avatars. The parties that make up Congress play important roles in the legislative process, in appointments to higher-level positions and in government control tasks. There is, therefore, a game in different areas that, in the case of the frustrated candidate Pineda, causes perplexity to understand that the script does not go as they would like it to be.
The current political struggle of a good number of Latin American countries presents a game model in which the greater leadership, assumed by the presidential figure, is imposed unrestrictedly in the face of party conditions.
The presidential will taxes any alleged vagaries of the group and does not understand that there are rules or strategies that can limit it. However, the articulated game has a certain complexity and today establishes three models that carry different implications.
The first follows the pattern in force in Mexico and El Salvador, where their presidents, Andrés Manuel López Obrador and Nayib Bukele, respectively, and who currently have the highest popular approval ratings in the region, manage vertically their respective parties created by themselves. As the prestigious El Faro points out, the Salvadoran party Nuevas Ideas is "a brand, a creation, to admire and venerate itself." It constitutes a manifestation of initiates that has Bukele as "pinnacle, sustained by absolute and fiducial loyalty, where negligence is qualified as impiety."
Every day more than a hundred videos are produced on YouTube that promote and boost the image of the president and that attack and destroy all obstacles, and has a high efficiency rate based on views and views. That assessment serves López Obrador, who, in addition, since he cannot be re-elected, is preparing in the coming months to control his succession within his formation, Morena, whose function is similar to that of New Ideas.
The Dominican Republic, Bolivia, Honduras, Nicaragua and Venezuela follow a similar path, although democratic performance is not present in the last two. The Modern Revolutionary Party, the Movement to Socialism, Libre, the Sandinista National Liberation Front and the United Socialist Party of Venezuela, respectively, are the instruments of political action of Luis Abinader, Luis Arce, even with serious problems of internal control; the marriage formed by Xiomara Castro and Mel Zelaya; Daniel Ortega and Nicolás Maduro. All of them were at the founding moment of the party that today is the primary instrument of the exercise of its power.
The second draws a scenario in which the president manages to articulate a coalition on the basis of his lean party and with uncertain success depending on the issues that must be forward.
This is the case of Argentina, Brazil, Chile, Colombia, Guatemala, Panama, Paraguay and Uruguay. In these, a fundamental variable is related to the maturity and consolidation of the party system to maintain a minimum stability in terms of governance of the system. Uruguay stands out for its great institutional framework, which, however, does not prevent the existence of certain tensions. Paraguay is also an exception because of the longevity of the ruling and preponderant Colorado party.
Colombia is an interesting case in which the unstable balance is unraveling, since the Partido de la U, with 11 senators and 15 representatives, has decided to officially leave the legislative coalition of the government of Gustavo Petro and declare itself independent.
It is a decision that comes shortly after the Conservative Party, with 15 senators and 25 representatives, did the same and moved away from the broad coalition built by Petro during the first months of his term and that had allowed him to approve the tax reform and the total peace law, among others.
The third model is defined by the presidents of Costa Rica, Ecuador and Peru who have neither managed to have their own political capital nor have a party with significant strength in Congress. While the latter two have suffered very serious crises, which have led to the call for elections, with the open scenario of interim in the presidency of Guillermo Lasso and the replacement of President Pedro Castillo by Vice President Dina Boluarte, in Costa Rica, the government of Rodrigo Chaves languishes sustained only by the hitherto solid nature of the Costa Rican political system.
These are models that show the heterogeneity of politics in the region around a tortuous game whose nature, in the face of aspects of an institutional nature, enthrones individual moods in which narcissism and incompetence have ample invoice.
Politics focuses almost exclusively on the actions of specific people, who have an unleashed drive for power and leave out the routinized behaviors that shape institutions. Therefore, it should not be strange that those who hold power, or are close, intervene in a game different from the rest: theirs.
Manuel Alcántara is a political scientist, professor emeritus at the University of Salamanca and the UPB (Medellín, Colombia)
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