opinion

The recent publication of the expenditures of the presidential discretionary funds reveals the clear fingerprint of the effect in Panama of the patrimonialist culture, by which politics is conceived of and managed as an extension of private space. Politics is privatized, as there is no separation between public and private space.

It has ceased to be a collective public space in order to transform itself into a scenario to satisfy private interests. Power is perceived as a means to satisfy private interests, which are now thought to have been won with votes, and therefore, are now the absolute property of the person who exercises political power.

The patrimonialist culture is present at all public levels, from those who take office materials home, to those who use the government's fuel for their personal ends.

Patronage is part of this culture. It's the administrative expression of the patrimonial concept, the giving of jobs and positions as personal benefits to the favored ones in exchange for support.

They offer support to group leaders who, in turn, do the same with the rank-and-file, forming a vertical chain occupying public posts. It's a mechanism of adhesion to the party as a function of the promised position.

The beneficiaries claim their pay, and given that there are always more promises than realities, protest and migrate to other parties, which are seen as employment agencies.

Clientelism is also a part of patrimonialism. The elector votes for representation, transferring his or her capacity for decision in many cases without any condition. It's giving everything for nothing. When the vote is cast it then appears to be the start, and paradoxically the end, of the relationship between the elector and the elected.

In a certain manner, the elected supplants the elector in the capacity to project the power that's transferred. To accomplish the supplantation, the elected uses the system's legitimate mechanisms as well as some others that are consecrated in the practice of realpolitic, like for example the clientelism in which the boss manages the relationship with the electors as a network of ties of complicity and as a market of favors, which register in a clientelist accounting and upon which the networks of family ties, cliques, jobs and protection weigh heavily. The population is treated as a mass of political consumers from which the arts and techniques of publicity yield their crops.

Clientelism follows through, producing at the end of the electoral process by benefiting the people and communities according to their status as political clients and not on the bases of their wants and needs. The traditional ways of playing the political system work with ever more complicity, conscious or unconscious, on the part of the people, who many times know how to find the pragmatic recourses that move them to operate politically in a determined manner. This is also noticed in the social and popular organizations when they show elements of the practice mentioned above, which accentuate the asymmetrical relation between the leaders and the bases --- the existence of methods and styles of conduct centered in personalism, lack of participation and premeditated manipulation.

What are some of the consequences of this patrimonialist culture? Democracy no longer represents a pluralist and inclusive space and become a pure market mechanism in the most pejorative sense. The people devalue democracy and consider it a system only at the service of the powerful, with the parties as groups of convenience and politics as an unscrupulous method of coming to power.

All of this makes the road toward then necessary institutionalization of political organizations more difficult. And its important to say that corruption has settled into the heart of the patrimonialist culture.

Confronted with the patrimonialist culture, it's important to make the government and parties transparent and democratic, in their structures and their functions; to promote by education and consciousness raising changes in the rules of individual and collective behavior, elevating democracy as a definite way of thinking, feeling and doing things; and to install ethics in politics within the framework of democracy, so as to restore to politics the capacity to guide the movement of society over the long run.

Long live Panama!



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