Pnma: New day

Panamanians went to the polls and handed the incumbents a series of humiliating defeats. The current administration is going out --- WAY out --- and most of the members of the current Legislative Assembly will have to start looking for new jobs.

Mireya Moscoso’s hand-picked presidential candidate, José Miguel Alemán, finished in a distant third place while the PRD’s Martín Torrijos broke through the party’s usual ceiling of about one-third of the electorate, taking just over 47 percent in a four-way race. Come September 1 the PRD will have an absolute majority in the legislature and control over most city halls.

Between now and then we may see some ugly displays from the defeated faction, but in the week after the election we saw the lack of a quorum rather than a Machiavellian frenzy over at the assembly. Maybe the assault on the public trust is in disarray while the in crowd waits for the Mireyista leaders to regain their senses. One party in the president’s coalition, the Partido Liberal Nacional, lost its ballot status and another, MOLIRENA, just barely held onto its legal existence. The Supreme Court has a politicized Mireyista majority that theoretically would hold through the next five years, but now the PRD will have the votes to pack the high court and thus override a series of decisions that block investigations and prosecutions of public corruption --- if that, indeed, is something that the Torrijistas care to do. Yet in the face of catastrophic defeat Mireya Moscoso and Maco Rosas pretend that nothing much happened, and act as if they are going to be leaders of the opposition come September 1 and back in power five years after that.