SANTO DOMINGO. To hear it told by the political analysts, if the Dominican Revolutionary Party (PRD) were to win the elections last Sunday, Miguel Vargas Maldonado would be kicked out of the party, and the same thing would happen if the party lost the elections.

Nevertheless, with the defeat no sealed, three elements are seen to favor the party president: first, inside the PRD there seems to be taking shape the idea that the principle cause of the defeat was the candidate himself, with a string of errors, some of which were of major capital negatives; which is to say, that as the figure of "Chacumbele" (a reference to a personage in a Cuban Guaracha song written in 1941 about a policeman that eventually "shot himself.") he killed himself. A second element, tied to the first, is that there are quite a few that think that with Miguel Vargas as a candidate, the election results would have been different, because the desire of the people for change could only be scared off by a candidate who did not represent anything new and who seemed to work hard to sow uncertainty during the process.

The third element that favors Vargas Maldonado is that repeatedly Mejia and the people around him said that the party was 99% integrated in the campaign. They went so far as to proclaim, in the face of repeated attempts to meet with the party president: "There is no date, (for a meeting), and I don't care either." Regarding the lack of integration by Vargas, Milagros Ortiz Bosch was heard to say: "No one person is indispensable for the triumph of the PRD."

With things like that, the person to blame will have to be found in more than one place, which will give an opportunity for Vargas to prepare the basis of his defense arguments in order to rebuild the party and gain time that will allow him to regroup those of his followers that, fulfilling the electoral commitment that inflated the 47% that the president of the party obtained in the convention and that was spurned by Mejia's followers.

It is precisely this point (the disdain of the forces of Miguel Vargas) that should be the beginning of the objective analysis of the reasons that led the PRD to the electoral debacle. The historical precedents testify to the fact that the times that the PRD won the elections, it did so based on alliances between winners and losers in the national convention. When Antonio Guzman won in 1978, he had Salvador Jorge Blanco; Salvador did the same thing with Jacobo Majluta (1982) and Hipolito did the same with Milagros Ortiz Bosch, Fello Subervi and Hatuey de Camps in 2000.

Now, this time, everything was backward. That unforgettable press conference in which the Organizing Commission, headed by Esquea Guerrero, summarily sealed the proceedings by reading bulletins 1,2, and 3 which gave Mejia the victory with 53% against 47% for Vargas. There was no space left for the necessary negotiations or for making a deal or pact. They did not even take into consideration the allegations of the losing candidate that in the convention the voting by members of the PRSC and the PLD was not halted, and that the functions of the National Convention were usurped when Mejia was proclaimed the victor before the vote counting was finished or that the voter registration lists had been hidden away. Neither did they pay attention to the proposal that the vice-presidential candidate should go to the Vargas team and that Mejia should back his nomination in 2016.

Triumphalism

To crown the succession errors, absorbed by the large advantage of between 17 and 20 percentage points that the polls gave over an un-named rival from the PLD, Mejia fell apart with his errors, and at the same time he alienated Miguel Vargas and his followers, he compacted the rank and file of the PLD by announcing that he would jail the corrupt, beginning with Felix Bautista, who just happened to be the person who headed up a group of "neutral senators" that were still fuming over the selection of Danilo Medina as the candidate. Not content with that, Mejia chose as the target of his campaign Leonel Fernandez and as if that were not enough, he launched a few unseemly "compliments" which touched the First Lady, all of which made the PLD, a party that is and of itself tightly bunched a monolithic mass.

Mejia spent the whole campaign going from mistake to mistake, which has put the idea in the heads of many, that at the moment of pointing fingers, Hipolito will get more than his fair share of the blame.

Uncertain future

When the rattling about fraud dies down, a call that was coined to sweeten the bitter defeat for the PRD rank and file; and when the post-electoral panorama dissipates, there will come a moment to take an accounting and clear things up.

The PRD must, imbued with a very big spirit of self-criticism, avoid a new break in their structure, although, to speak the truth, if the evaluation is done dispassionately, there is no way to avoid a process of "de-ticking" for the "ox that pulls the most," because there inside, there are people that do not eat off the same plate.

The fight is "set to go" in the PRD, and if we talk of a fight, it is because there is more than one gladiator in the arena, contrary to what was thought about solving everything by removing Vargas.

It seems that it will be a long fight, that goes from the dangerous call by the National Executive Committee (CEN), the only authority that, until the National Convention can be called, has the statutory and legal power to validate and solution and incline the balance to the side of whoever has the most specific weight in the party structure.