Both this newspaper’s aim of objectivity in news reporting and the ‘veda’ electoral curfew now in force stand in the way of telling readers for whom to vote in tomorrow’s Buenos Aires Province midterms but even without such inhibitions or restrictions, it might not be so much a question of telling people for whom to vote as urging them to vote in the first place. No easy task because the poverty of debate in this campaign has made the civic irresponsibility of abstention more justifiable than normal while the number of candidates without the least intention of occupying their legislative seats in the event of victory leaves the ordinary person wondering whether anything important is at stake.
Both the main contenders have sought to inject more importance into this election to renew (if that is the right word) half the seats in the notoriously inactive bicameral legislative branch of Buenos Aires Province by nationalising the dispute, subordinating its result to a greater game, but this has only deepened the impoverishment of the debate. When have such vital issues as education and health made the headlines? Both these areas have been defined as provincial responsibilities for over three decades now with the decentralisation only advancing in recent times and should be at the forefront of debate. There is much to discuss with plenty of ammunition for both sides with education in a crisis at all three levels in Buenos Aires Province while its hospitals overspill into the capital yet nobody seems to have anything to say. Even crime (where there is a clear local responsibility with a Buenos Aires provincial police force of over 90,000 officers) seems to have receded as an issue recently after surfacing in the early stages of the campaign.
A real pity that such issues as education and health were orphans of debate because this campaign could have been a valuable testing-ground for seeking alternatives between the chainsaw and populist throwing money at the problems, alternatives so much needed at national level too, instead of an advance opinion poll for next month’s midterms. Nor are those seeking the middle ground or a third way between the polarisation spelling out alternatives with any clarity. Even when attention has been drawn to crime, its policing has not been brought into question with any consistency, nor the lack of judges to try the criminals with over 700 vacancies in the judicial benches in all jurisdictions in Buenos Aires Province.
“All politics is local,” a phrase linked to United States Congress Speaker Tip O’Neill from deep in the past century, so that, aside from provincial responsibilities, tomorrow’s election could have been an opportunity to take a closer look at local government, especially since mayors are said to be the main driving-force behind mobilising whatever might be tomorrow’s turnout with the higher levels reserving their main guns for next month’s midterms. But town hall issues have not entered the debate either apart from some jabs at municipal taxation while most mayors have made their campaigning strictly local, each to their own, instead of teaming up to press for more regard for local government from the national and provincial levels.
And finally, the electorate itself cannot be exempted from blame for the deficiencies in the democratic system. “Every country has the government it deserves,” it has been said almost since the citizenry had any choice in the matter, and while sometimes harsh, the dictum sticks. Too many people react to the shortfalls of the electoral system (based on a hopelessly outdated 1934 constitutional reform in the case of Buenos Aires Province) or the absence of vital issues such as education and health with apathy instead of proposing improvements.
Any number of reasons not to vote tomorrow yet the consequences could be worse. Nature abhors a vacuum and this week’s recovery of the baroque portrait stolen by the Nazis in Amsterdam 85 years ago might serve as an oblique reminder of the kind of regime which could move into that vacuum. Those W.B. Yeats lines from his poem ‘The Second Coming’: “The best lack all conviction while the worst/Are full of passionate intensity” could be applied to tomorrow’s election in Buenos Aires Province since there is a strong case for considering abstention the most rational option. Yet even without credible candidates in sight, the citizenry is obliged to keep democracy in motion with their votes in the hope of installing more representative electoral systems in the future because even a dysfunctional democracy is better than its discontinuation.
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