…something still
smells like the same old, same old all over again:
The candidate for the Broad Front, who won 47% of the votes yesterday but could not become president and must now fight a second round, criticized the elections system in his country, where a candidate has to win fifty percent of the vote, plus one, in order to win. “We have to go on struggling,” Mujica said.In an interview with Radio 10, Mujica said that “in some parts of the world, a party with 47% wins the elections, but in Uruguay, no.”Mujica considers that “we have a right-wing bloc divided into two parties who help each other when the chips are down.”
Translation mine:
Ah yes, the old Blanco/Colorado oligarchy, that’s governed Uruguay for almost as long as there have been elections in that land. That’s what he’s referring to, and undoubtedly it’s true. When the same two parties keep swapping rule but nothing really changes, you know you’re dealing with a duopoly. And when the duopoly gives way to a military dictatorship, as it did during the 1970s, you know that it was a farce all along.
José “Pepe” Mujica, who fought against both the duopoly
and the dictatorship at various times during his Tupamaro days, undoubtedly knows this well-scripted farce by heart. He may be 74 and look like a nice old grandfather now, but he hasn’t forgotten what he took up arms against when he was a young man. While the weapon has changed (it’s now ballots, not bullets), the struggle has not.
And he notes, quite rightly, that second rounds are not necessary everywhere; right here in Canada, the latest government took much less than 47% of the ballots in the last two elections. Harpo would kill for anything approaching Pepe’s degree of popularity, probably because it would give him
carte blanche to ram through something utterly unpopular (such as
this) over the loud objections of a very clear majority of Canadians! All that’s holding him back is that he hasn’t got a majority of 50%, much less 50 + 1. And while we’re not a duopoly to the extent that Uruguay for the longest time was, we’re not far from it, either; we’ve got a long-time farce of Liberal vs. Conservative swapping going on, although it’s acrimonious rather than buddy-buddy as in Uruguay. Still, at times it’s hard to tell which is which, and that’s never good.
But one thing we don’t have, which Uruguay does, is that burden of the need for a clear majority in order to form a government. It’s a burden which stacks the deck in favor of established parties, and makes it harder for a leftist coalition like the Frente Amplio (Mujica’s party, or more accurately,
parties) to gain a foothold–not that a first-past-the-post system necessarily makes anything easier, as we up here know only too well. Either system clearly favors the oligarchs, and unless a leftist with true mass appeal breaks out in a big way, as in Venezuela and Bolivia, well–we’re stuck.
Meanwhile, in Uruguay, a second round–totally unnecessary, except for keeping up appearances (and tensions) will go down on November 29. It’s practically a foregone conclusion that Pepe Mujica will win, because his opponent is a
truly loathsome old oligarch and an apologist for the dictatorship. But it’s not a “clear majority”, so the very farce that Pepe fought against as a young man is perpetuating itself–and inadvertently proving that he was right all along.
Ironically, had he moved further to the left, instead of trying to make a play for the “mushy middle” (which always goes to the conservatives, when all’s said, out of cowardice), he might have gotten the outright majority and then some on the first round, as Chavecito did in Venezuela, ten years ago. Venezuela was deeply embroiled in a long-term crisis, starting in the mid-1980s. Uruguay isn’t there yet. But if the global economic crisis deepens, as I suspect it will, and foreign investments end up sacking it as they have in the past, we may well see a shift at last. And then perhaps Pepe Mujica may have to reconsider his “reformist” tendencies and become a real revolutionary once more. And then we may end up seeing some truly hilarious backpedalling from people like the morons at the Wall Street Urinal, who felt the need to
recast Mujica–obviously no neoliberal–in the most capitalist-friendly light possible, just to keep up the artificial dichotomy between the “good” left and the “bad”. Which, if the video below has anything to say, is a farce, too:
Mujica, far from wanting to distance himself from Chavecito, wants to learn more from him. Can you blame the man?
Nothing succeeds like success, and Chavecito knows it well. You can bet he’ll be helping Mujica steer a better path after the 29th of next month. And when he does, it will throw a puck in the Wall Street Urinal–and any other media cloaca that burbles happy horseshit about how neoliberalism is poised to make a comeback.
