The opposition platform D Frente, born out of a concertation of different organizations, is asking Cubans to abstain in the next elections for deputies to the National Assembly of People’s Power on March 26. In a statement issued this Tuesday, he invites citizens to participate in a campaign they call “Your abstention is your voice” and which consists of disclosing in networks “a reason” why they would refrain from participating in the vote.
For D Frente, the data from the last two elections, the referendum on the Family Code and the municipal elections, in September and November 2022, respectively, in which abstention reached record numbers, reveal a “quite clear trend” in the current political system: the “accelerated loss” of representative capacity. “He does not represent his own followers, because they cannot choose between a plurality of their supposed representatives, and they do not represent society as a whole because it cannot freely choose between alternatives that are really present in the country,” they indicate.
For this reason, they predict that “this new reality” will be confirmed on March 26: the divorce between “the official representative model” and “the real country.”
“When out of 8 million voters, 3 cannot find channels of representation, the problem lies with the system,” asserts the platform, which points out that the 470 deputies that will be elected that day are proposed by “organizations registered in the organizational chart of the State”.
D Frente says that the electoral process, which began on January 30, began “violating the electoral law in at least two essential points”, with “the non-publication of the electoral roll and with a full-fledged electoral campaign.”
This, the platform continues, is an indication of “two profound realities”: on the one hand, emigration, which accounts for 3% of the island’s electorate and which the Government “avoids exposing and contrasting”, and on the other, the obligation to the one in which the regime is forced to “fight by all possible public means the attendance at the polls of each and every one of the Cuban voters” given the “progressive rupture of the so-called revolutionary consensus”.
“Now anyone could vote in any college”, which “could lend itself to them inflating the figures and presenting a better result than that of the previous elections”
Given these two facts, the organization urgently demands “a new political contract for Cuba that expresses its new plural, social and generational dynamics.”
For this, they state that “the strategic route” goes through “a constitutional reform that establishes popular sovereignty as a superior stony principle, that establishes a rule of law without ideologies and that eliminates the unique character of the communist party”, as a first step towards “free, pluralistic, fair and comprehensive democratic elections”.
Along with participation in the “Your abstention is your voice” campaign, D Frente suggests that Cubans request the certification that accredits voter status before the Electoral Council of each municipality, a step, they explain, “legally essential for those who have supported or want to support with their signatures the various legislative and constitutional initiatives promoted by organizations that make up our platform”.
The playwright exiled in Madrid Yunior Garcia Aguileraa member of D Frente, declares to 14ymedio in a personal capacity that urging abstention is the right thing to do and that the campaign for the rejection vote has to be redoubled, but he warns that the regime has a thousand ways to make those 470 deputies ultimately get elected”.
As an example, he gives that, unlike the municipal elections, “now anyone could vote in any school”, which “could lend itself to them inflating the figures and presenting a better result than that of the previous elections”. Thus, he explains that in some municipalities they intend to reach 90% or even 95% participation. The artist and opponent does not believe that they reach that figure, but he does believe that “they can manage to exceed the last data, that of the municipal ones.” In any case, he recalls, there will be no difference, since a deputy only needs 50% plus 1 of the positive votes to be elected.
“The only remote way for a candidate not to be elected is for people to agree in that place and vote for another candidate and that will not happen,” he asserts, but insists on the symbolic value of abstention: “If If we exceed the number of the previous elections, it would be a forceful response to the regime, even if it did not change the results at all”.
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