All politics is local
Tomorrow’s candidates should be judged as monitors of local governance rather than as projections of any national party. But before advising voters as to their perspective when casting their ballots, it is imperative to urge them to vote in the first place.
The headline of this editorial – attributed to Thomas ‘Tip’ O’Neill, the Congress Speaker in Washington, several decades ago – has been widely turned on its head for tomorrow’s midterm elections to replace half the Buenos Aires City Legislature with the implied interpretation that even local government can and should be politicised. But these lines propose to defend the original meaning of this famous quote and not just because endorsement of any of the 17 lists in contention would be flouting the ‘veda’ electoral curfew – tomorrow’s candidates should be judged as monitors of local governance rather than as projections of any national party.
But before advising voters as to their perspective when casting their ballots, it is imperative to urge them to vote in the first place. In last Sunday’s midterm elections in four provinces, the average turnout barely scraped 60 percent, almost 10 percentage points below the levels of the previous midterms in 2021 in the midst of pandemic lockdown. Such electoral apathy stems from a widespread disenchantment with party politics for which substandard politicians are invariably blamed but an introspective citizenry should be encouraged to engage in a bit more introspection here and start asking themselves how often they look inside and aside rather than outside to injustices and problems. There is a toxic individualism afoot in society with a self-styled anarcho-capitalist president a symptom rather than its cause. People are encapsulated in their own square yard (and often enough the even tinier space of their smartphones) rather than forming part of a wider community or even the block on which they live. A more charitable interpretation might say that people rightly feel helpless in the face of situations beyond their control but in that case their elected representatives can be a bridge to the big wide world.
Even in these times of electoral apathy there will be more people voting than not tomorrow and it is important to understand that they will be voting for City legislators to resolve urban problems (with declaring a default against the International Monetary Fund, as proposed by one candidate, way beyond its scope) – all politics is more local than ever or should be. While tomorrow’s election has been hijacked by national parties as a kind of substitute for the scrapped PASO primaries, it should not be debased into a political beauty contest – the proposals on municipal issues should always be the criterion for judging the candidates rather than their party label.
Rather than endorse any candidate, this newspaper leaves his or her vote up to the citizen and in all cases their choice can be right or wrong, according to the criteria. Taking the candidates favoured by the opinion polls, any notion of a personal vote for the President on the grounds that his party is represented by his daily voice would be almost tantamount to a spoiled ballot since neither President Javier Milei nor such predecessors as Cristina Fernández de Kirchner or Mauricio Macri are candidates tomorrow, but if the citizen sincerely believes that this choice might lead to less municipal taxation, bureaucracy and red tape, the vote gains more legitimacy. Nor should scare tactics against Peronism sway anybody’s decision because netting less votes than in previous elections to land seven or eight seats in a 60-seat City legislature is never going to derail an economy or a nation – instead this rebranded label should be judged according to its municipal proposals to see if there is any substantial improvement. The local ruling party should not be seen through the prism of the current infighting to dominate the political spectrum right of centre but according to how City Hall’s urban management is judged – which should not be on the basis of the horror stories told by some opposition candidates but the reality of today’s metropolis. And so on, but stopping here so as to avoid the risk of violating the veda any further.
Having made municipal issues so much the focus of this editorial, it must be admitted that both the candidates and the media have done a singularly poor job in enlightening the citizenry. Yet precisely the most self-absorbed individual can stumble on a crack in the pavement and the main challenge for tomorrow’s election is to convince people to vote in the first place – to value their democratic vote on the one day they are kings and queens with the powers that be at their mercy. Once this happens, the truth of Tip O’Neill’s dictum stands to prevail – all politics is local.