Caribbean & Central America - May 2011 (ISSN 1741-4458)

The two oldest right-wing political parties in El Salvador are fighting for survival. The Partido Demócrata Cristiana (PDC) and the Partido de Conciliación Nacional (PCN) were dealt a hammer blow this month by the supreme court, which stripped them of official recognition. The PCN and PDC now have just six months in order to collect 50,000 signatures of support apiece in order to register again to compete in the legislative and municipal elections on 11 March 2012.

The supreme court ruled that the PDC and the PCN should have been stripped of legal recognition in 2004, when they failed to clear the minimum threshold of 3% of the national vote in presidential elections. The supreme electoral tribunal (TSE) upheld their complaint in 2005 that their disappearance would violate article 85 of the constitution enshrining a pluralist system of politics in El Salvador. A week later the legislative assembly waived the 3% requirement in a legislative decree.

The supreme court was singularly unimpressed and ruled that the decree had contravened the constitution. Quite why it took six years to reach this conclusion, during which time the two parties have contested two further legislative elections and one presidential election, is unclear.

Those were the days
It is a spectacular fall from grace for the PDC and the PCN, which were founded at the start of the 1960s. The right-of-centre PDC, which has just celebrated its 50th anniversary having been founded in November 1960, governed for much of the civil war in the 1980s. The PDC’s former president José Napoleón Duarte headed the civil-military government between 1980 and 1982 and a civil government between 1984 and 1989. The PCN, a right-wing party and political face of the military, was founded in 1961. It held sway between 1962 and 1979, supplying four straight presidents.

Those halcyon days are, of course, long gone, as a new right-wing outfit, Alianza Republicana Nacionalista (Arena) emerged to dominate the political scene, pushing both parties to the periphery of political life. Arena came to power in 1989 and maintained an unbroken stranglehold on power for 20 years until the left-wing Frente Farabundo Martí para la Liberación Nacional (FMLN) brought Mauricio Funes to power in 2009. Arena itself has suffered setbacks since then, with party infighting ensuing as it struggled to accustom itself to life in opposition. This led to a schism and the formation of the Gran Alianza por la Unidad Nacional (Gana).

Gana is likely to be the biggest beneficiary of the supreme court ruling if the PDC and the PCN fail to gather the requisite number of signatures to register candidates by the November deadline for next March’s elections. It could well eclipse Arena as the country’s largest right-wing party (see sidebar).

Current composition of legislative assembly

• Boost for Gana

Although both the PDC and the PCN are traditional allies of Arena against the FMLN, there is considerable enmity too. If the parties are wound up, the leading lights are more likely to enlist in the ranks of Gana rather than reach an unpalatable accommodation with Arena: the reactionary Arena party leadership committee (Coena) brooks no dissent, and the very strict discipline it demands of affiliates, and its hostility to reform, led to 12 deputies leaving to form Gana in 2009.