Pure and hard electoralism of Mario Abdo in his speech to Congress.
In 2018, Paraguayans elected a Government to promote economic and social development by solving existing problems and projecting the country into the future. That is what is expected of any ruler who is installed in power.
What do we have in July 2022? A President of the Republic converted into a campaign operator for an internal partisan party, passing bills of institutional morale to whoever preceded him in the presidential chair.
And the new stage that Mr. Abdo Benítez had promised when he took office in 2018? “What history are we going to build from now on?” he questioned himself, speaking to the country in terms full of good sense and hope. He answered himself:
“This is the beginning of a real transformation full of hopes, illusions, and challenges. A path that allows us to decide if we look forward, towards the future, or stay in the past, if we want to repeat the sterile divisions, the eternal fights or we want a country and a united people”. And in the best style of evangelical pastors, he apostrophized: “Let us remember that forgiveness heals the soul, brings reconciliation and peace.”
But now, when he has 13 months left in office and his internal party movement is immersed in a savage electoral campaign, Abdo Benítez could not resist the temptation to wave the accusatory index and shoot hyperboles against “those who intend to sustain themselves without the popular will and outside the rules of the rule of law”.
Without naming him, he made it clear that Horacio Cartes distorted the Republic by putting it at the service of “personal interests or autocratic ambitions.” He blamed him for having lowered the public function by subordinating it to mafia and criminal groups, using reserved information from the State to fatten private businesses, making sure to implement public institutions to escape the jurisdictional scrutiny of justice.
It was a furious emotional discharge that looked like a foreign body grafted onto his gray grocer’s account of kilometers of routes built and tons of captured macoña. Pure and hard electoralism exercised from a body that the Republic entrusted to report on matters of general interest and not to turn it into a stage for a settling of scores.
Abdo Benítez could have been simply formal and boring, but he preferred pathos out of context in search of votes for his movement, verbally machine-gunning his opponent.
We do not elect a President for that.
