Caribbean & Central America - December 2012 (ISSN 1741-4458)

It is not everyday that voting on a budget turns so acrimonious that it changes the balance of power in congress. But that is what happened in El Salvador on 8 November. The main opposition Alianza Republicana Nacionalista (Arena) was plunged into disarray after four of its deputies voted in favour of the government’s budget for 2013. The leadership committee promptly expelled the deputies who refused to toe the party line – abstention - with the result that the left-wing Frente Farabundo Martí para la Liberaciόn Nacional (FMLN) is now the largest party in congress.

The 2013 budget proposal of Finance Minister Carlos Cáceres passed with the approval of 55 of the 84 deputies in the legislative assembly. At US$4.51bn it is up nearly 7% on this year. The FMLN won the backing of all of the parties in the assembly except for the 33-strong Arena bloc.

However, four of the Arena deputies broke rank and voted in favour of the budget. This elicited shrill cries of indignation from the Arena party hierarchy which expelled the four rebels - Sigifredo Ochoa Pérez, Santos Adelmo, Jesús Grande and Rigoberto Soto - from the party. The upshot is that Arena now only has 29 deputies while the FMLN becomes the largest single party in the assembly with 31.

The vote of the four rebels was hardly decisive: the budget only required a simple majority of 43 votes, which the FMLN obtained with the backing of the party of Arena dissidents Gran Alianza por la Unidad Nacional (Gana), with 11 seats (see sidebar), and nine others. However, the draconian action by the Arena leadership committee (Coena) could have been designed to deter any further deputies from breaking rank.

The government needs one more Arena deputy to secure a two-thirds majority of 56 in the assembly, which is required for the approval of external financing and loans. Part of the budget proposal Cáceres submitted for approval is an US$80m loan from the World Bank to upgrade the country’s hospitals, and a further loan of US$60m for a family agriculture plan (PAF), which assists thousands of low-income families in El Salvador.

The official Arena line is that the loans are unacceptable because the country cannot afford them. It maintains that the budget itself is not properly financed and would lead to the country becoming over-indebted. Arena deputy Enrique Valdez argued that the 2013 budget was predicated on growth of 2.3% when “everybody knows it will not exceed 1%”. This projected growth, at a time when the global economy is hardly firing on all cylinders, is unquestionably ambitious as it is not far off twice the GDP growth to which the country has been forced to become accustomed in recent years.

Donato Vaquerano, head of Arena’s legislative bloc, said the dissident deputies had “betrayed the party and the country” by selling their consciences (and their votes): Coena alleged that they accepted bribes of US$400,000 each to back the budget. The other Arena deputies formed a human cordon around the four rebels in the legislative assembly, booing.

President Mauricio Funes denied that his government had sought to divide Arena, still less offered any kind of inducement to the four deputies to vote in favour of the budget. Funes did admit, however, that he had met the Arena leadership and Arena deputies along with various other members of his government to discuss the budget.

Funes maintained in an interview on 20 November with the national daily La Prensa Gráfica that the four Arena deputies had simply been demonstrating “the true exercise of democracy” and that if a handful of Republicans in the US Congress had opted to vote with the Democrats on an issue it would not immediately be assumed that they must have accepted a bung. Funes added that article 125 of the constitution made it clear that deputies voted in accordance with their consciences and in the interests of members of the public who had voted for them in national elections, and were not obliged to adhere to a party line.

In practice, however, it is not nearly as simple as that. For one thing, failure to toe the party line invariably spells the end of a deputy’s political career within that party, as the leadership committee can choose where to position candidates on party lists, although this practice has been reformed by the crusading constitutional chamber of El Salvador’s supreme court. It is also worth noting that, back in January 2005, the FMLN party leadership expelled two of its deputies who voted to approve the budget presented by then-president Tony Saca of Arena.

FMLN opts for unity ticket

The FMLN has overridden internal party differences and chosen the best possible candidate to complete its presidential ticket, in the eyes of the general public, ahead of elections in 2014. Oscar Ortiz, the moderate mayor of Santa Tecla, was chosen by an FMLN national party convention on 11 November to run as vice-president on the same ticket as Salvador Sánchez Cerén, the incumbent Vice-President.

    Irreconcilable differences between the orthodox wing of the FMLN, which controls the party hierarchy, and the more moderate, reformist, wing of the party, led by Ortiz, have prevailed since 2003. Ortiz was ostracised by the party orthodoxy after he had the temerity to challenge the veteran (now-deceased) former guerrilla Schafik Hándal for the party’s presidential candidacy that year.

    Sánchez Cerén, another veteran guerrilla, is far more pragmatic than Hándal. He tweeted that after “profound reflection” he had reached the conclusion that Ortiz was the most suitable candidate to be his running mate. His decision will have been influenced, to a large degree, by Ortiz’s popularity - he is one of the most popular politicians in the country – and his own lack of popularity.

   Recent polls by Mitofsky and LPG-Datos, published in September, showed Sánchez Cerén trailing the Arena candidate, Norman Quijano, the popular mayor of San Salvador, by more than 20 percentage points, a formidable early lead. This tallies with the results of an internal poll organised by the government’s secretary for strategic affairs, Hato Hasbún, which was carried out in late August but not made public. Hasbún told the FMLN party leadership that house-to-house surveys had demonstrated that Quijano was amassing a huge lead over Sánchez Cerén.

    Sánchez Cerén’s best chance of reversing this is by attracting floating voters -and this is where Ortiz fits in. Renowned for being conciliatory and pro-business, Ortiz, like Funes, has an ability to reach beyond the fault lines of El Salvador’s polarised political landscape. Sánchez Cerén himself is talking a good game. He says the FMLN must demonstrate that it is “the new Left: a pluralist and tolerant party”. The public will be far less sceptical of his intentions with Ortiz by his side.

    The big question, however, is why Ortiz consented to buttress Sánchez Cerén’s wobbly candidacy. What is he getting out of it? He denies attaching any pre-conditions to his acceptance of the post but he must at least have sought reassurances that he would be more than the traditionally powerless figurehead as Vice-President. Senior figures in the FMLN have hinted that he could be given a new brief as cabinet chief and play a pivotal role in the design of the party’s plan of governance.

• Arena’s travails

The departure of the four Arena rebels is the second significant split in the right-wing opposition party since it lost its long stranglehold on power in 2009. Within months of losing presidential power, a group of 11 dissidents left Arena and formed Gran Alianza Nacional (Gana), which has been prepared to work with the Funes administration and approve a series of legislative initiatives opposed by Arena.

• Funes in Spain

President Funes echoed the voices of many of his Latin American counterparts during the XXII Ibero-American summit, held in Spain’s south-western port city of Cádiz in mid November. Funes said that “the old recipes of adjustment have only brought recession and those countries that have applied these mistaken policies have gone backwards”. He thanked the Spanish government, however, for its support of his government’s programmes to prevent youth violence.