Hipolito and Miguel Vargas have differences regarding preferential vote

Vargas feels that it was a "patch" which affects the consensus, but Mejia says that the proposal is intelligent

SANTO DOMINGO. The imminent approval in the Senate of the preferential vote continues to generate contradictions in the leadership and the upper layers of the political parties.

Yesterday, the president of the Dominican Revolutionary Party (PRD), Miguel Vargas, and the former President Hipolito Mejia expressed different positions on the issue, since Vargas catalogued the approval of the proposal in the Chamber of Deputies as untimely.

The president of the opposition party said that the preferential vote should be dealt with as part of the legislative proposal of the Law of Political Parties and Groups, and the Law of Electoral Guarantees.

"We cannot continue to keep putting patches on the issues of the institutional system, such as the reform of the Electoral Law and the Law of Political Parties," he noted.

Vargas stated that that in order to work for the democratic system any reform should be approved by a consensus.

He said that after committing the political parties in the presence of the Churches and the Central Electoral Board, what is expected of the Congress is the approval of the election legislation that is pending, including an agreed upon decision with relation to the issue of the preferential vote.

For Mejia the approval of the preferential vote by the majority of the deputies was intelligent and brave because there were opposing forces that were seeking to convert the parties into "puppets."

The former President said that the candidates for deputy should win over the leaders of the parties' rank and file.

"The arguments about the internal struggles are a problem. No man, it is not democracy when he who has the most force wins and that does not have any force loses," he decreed.

He rejected that the rich candidates have advantages over those that have less because with the crisis in which as he understood it we are living, all the funding is given to the people.

"This is no advantage, the advantage is leadership. I congratulate the deputies for having done this and I expect that the senators will do it also," he insisted.

But the senator and member of the PLD Political Committee, Julio Cesar Valentin, argues that the preferential vote will generate a disproportionate competition among those aspiring to nominations in a party, and which might fragment the cohesion and discipline.

"I believe in the list, but a list that is the 100% result of a democratic contest," he indicated.

A call to broaden it

The former senator and presidential hopeful from the PLD, Jose Tomas Perez, said that the preferential vote was a triumph of democracy over autocracy in the political parties. "Before its implementation the attempts to develop leadership were not worth anything, since the congressional posts were determined by the top leadership of the parties," he said.

He said he felt that instead of eliminating it, it should be expanded to include the senators.