The latest known surveys that collect data with a view to the 2024 elections have been reflecting a significant level of undecided when the respondents are presented with the possible scenarios for that democratic event.
It is foreseeable that, with the distance of 21 months for the general elections of May 2024, an appreciable group of people who appear on the voter registry do not have a definition, even if the scenarios were outlined.
In the midst of the COVID-19 pandemic that was at its height in July 2020, there was an understandable context for electoral participation to be modest, regardless of the fact that factors that motivated the influx of voters were combined, the main one being it was the desire of an immense majority of the population to leave the Government of the Dominican Liberation Party.
Even so, abstention was a very important 44.7%, the highest in the last decades of electoral democracy in the Dominican Republic, if we remember that there were processes in which the participation of the electorate was close to 80%.
In other words, with some notable exceptions, the participation of Dominicans in the elections tends to maintain its strength, which is due, in a certain way, to the fact that the parties have been able to maintain their influence, despite the fact that, in some way, way they themselves have tried to undermine its base.
Now, the parties should apply a kind of SWOT to look inside and banish what would be their most visible threats—and in a certain way even dangerous—that could ruin that relative strength that has allowed them to recover above the predominant current in Latin America, consisting of the periodic sweeping of traditional formations.
That analysis should, in the first instance, generate enough self-criticism for the parties to realize that they have been flirting with their self-destruction, which if it hasn’t happened is because thriving around the parties allows thousands of people to feed their own hope.
When we say that they have been flirting with disaster, it is because those institutional initiatives that were supposed to improve the parties were used as tools of sectarianization, tending to annihilate internal adversaries.
The most recent effort in this direction is found in the Law of Parties, which sought to strengthen political organizations, but which, after going from drawer to drawer for 20 years in Congress, was used to support the interests of one sector over another. in the PLD, giving rise to legislation that has been dismembered by the Constitutional Court as useless.
