ARGENTINA: NGOs Campaign for Clean Politics

By Marcela Valente Reprint | | Print |

Marcela Valente

BUENOS AIRES, Oct 27 2003 (IPS) - ”Political Reform Now!” is the theme of a campaign to be launched next month by a group of civil society organisations in Argentina, fed up with a political system widely seen as riddled with corruption.

The 20 local non-governmental organisations (NGOs) are demanding political reforms, giving voice to public opinion’s calls for an overhaul of the political system, which took on momentum since Argentina’s late 2001 economic and social collapse.

The campaign will include a petition drive in which citizens will press lawmakers to commit their support to the passage of new laws designed to make the electoral system, as well as the functioning of political parties and the country’s democratic institutions in general, more transparent.

”We are seeking a cultural change. This is not just a question of collecting signatures to support passage of a specific new law,” Gonzalo Arguello, the coordinator of the campaign, told IPS. ”We want the citizens to commit themselves to this initiative that is calling for greater oversight and control over political activity.”

For at least a decade, governments have promised to adopt, and civil society has demanded, political reforms aimed at restoring the prestige of Argentina’s badly discredited political class and shoring up public confidence in the way politics are done in this Southern Cone country of 37 million.

But the resistance put up the country’s politicians has effectively blocked any such efforts.

The NGOs believe the climate is more favourable to pushing through reforms since the late 2001 crisis which led to the resignation of then-president Fernando de la Rúa, who was forced to step down by massive protests in which tens of thousands of people from all walks of life chanted ”Out With the Lot of Them!”, referring to the country’s political leaders.

Among the 20 NGOs taking part in the campaign are Compromiso Ciudadano, Ciudadanos para el Cambio, Faro, Fundación Conciencia, Fundación Innova, Fundación Polis, Grupo Sophia, Hagamos Algo, Poder Ciudadano and Vox Populi, all of which are dedicated to demanding greater public input and participation in politics.

Some of the groups emerged in the heat of the 2001 crisis, when huge numbers of citizens made it clear that they had had it with the country’s political leadership, widely considered corrupt, or in the best of cases ineffective in terms of coming up with solutions to the country’s pressing problems.

The NGOs campaign is not seeking a debate on specific reforms or a particular draft law, but instead will gather signatures to demand changes in key areas like elections, in order to make the country’s legislators more representative of, and responsible to, their constituents.

”One of the loudest demands by the citizenry is the elimination of the system of closed lists,” Magdalena Bosch, in charge of the NGO Fundación Conciencia’s political reform programme, told IPS.

Under Argentina’s closed-list system, citizens must vote for all of the parliamentary candidates fielded by a given party, and cannot cross out names on the list.

Voters tend to be drawn in by one or two candidates with a strong image, who head the lists. But the lists also include candidates with whom most voters are not familiar, including relatives of local ”caudillos” or political leaders, who are not always suited or prepared for politics, said Bosch.

The campaign will also demand enforcement of the requirement that all government officials and candidates to elective posts make a personal financial statement. Although the Law on Public Ethics, enacted in 1999, says such reports are necessary, it fails to provide for sanctions for those who do not present one.

The Centre for the Implementation of Public Policies for Equity and Growth, one of the NGOs pressing for political reform, mobilised around 100 volunteers last year to carry out a phone campaign to get the country’s 72 national senators to present financial disclosure reports.

But only 30 members of the Senate presented reports in response to the campaign. The rest did not do so until the president of the Senate himself asked them to, said María Barón, a researcher with the Centre for the Implementation of Public Policies.

”The reluctance of many legislators to make personal financial reports open to the public is just one example of the high degree of dissociation between the ‘representatives’ and ‘the represented’, and of the climate of secrecy and obscurity surrounding the decision-making process,” said Barón.

The elimination of the system of closed lists should be the central focus of any reform project, but the issue ”cannot even be brought up in parliamentary commissions due to the heavy resistance by the political leaders,” parliamentary Deputy Graciela Ocaña, who represents the small Alternative for a Republic of Equals (ARI) party, told IPS.

With respect to alternatives to the current voting system, Ocaña said she was opposed to the system used in many countries, in which one legislator is elected per voting district. She argued that it diminishes the representation of small parties.

The NGOs prefer a system that would permit voters to give their support only to those candidates in whom they have confidence, instead of forcing them to vote for all of the names on a party’s closed list.

”A system under which voters could express their preferences would improve the quality of election campaigns, because it would require the candidates to assume a commitment to society, and not to the party as is currently the case,” said Ocaña.

But she acknowledged that no political party would readily agree to eliminating the closed lists.

”There is not only resistance from the strongest parties, but from all of the ‘old-guard’ politicians, who refuse to accept new conditions, regardless of the party to which they belong,” she said.

The NGOs also want to eliminate the ”ley de lemas”, in which the candidate who takes the most votes can actually end up losing the election.

Under that system, which is used in some provinces, parties can field several candidates for one post, and the votes they win are added up. The election then goes to the most-voted candidate within the party that took the greatest number of votes overall.

The NGOs also want more effective monitoring of campaign financing. An Argentine law requires candidates to account for their campaign spending, but there are often ”enormous doubts” regarding the accuracy of their reports, said Ocaña.

The lawmaker, who helped write the current law on party financing, and who served as the financial manager of the ARI campaign, said better enforcement of such laws is needed.

Another of the objectives of the NGO campaign is to push for the adoption of measures that would curb or eliminate clientelism and nepotism, seen in practices like the granting of scholarships or pensions by legislators and the swapping of civil servant posts for votes.

Public employees who belong to different parties admitted to IPS, on condition of anonymity, that they owe their posts to the parties for which they have worked, especially in election campaigns, and that they ”voluntarily” hand over a proportion of their salaries to their party.

Another example of the clientelistic practices that the NGOs want to uproot was an unusual offer made this month to voters in elections in the northeastern province of Formosa by Mario Brignole, the ruling Justicialista (Peronist) Party candidate for mayor in the town of El Colorado.

Brignole was elected mayor after pledging in his campaign to raffle a new car among those who voted for him. His supporters distributed 7,000 numbered vouchers among those who promised to cast their ballots for him – who are now waiting to see if he will keep his promise.