Torrijos doing unpopular things early

TRecent polls commissioned by the El Panama America and La Prensa and conducted by the Latin American affiliates of Gallup and Harris indicate that Martín Torrijos retains the support of most Panamanians but that his inaugural honeymoon with public opinion is over.

A Dichter & Neira poll taken for La Prensa in mid-January while the debate about the tax increase proposal was just getting underway indicated that more than 50 percent of Panamanians thought Torrijos was doing a good or very good job, but that’s low in comparison to the public approval ratings at the same point in Mireya Moscoso’s and Ernesto Pérez Balladares’s presidencies. But at those points in his predecessors’ terms they hadn’t done many controversial things, while Torrijos stirred up protests even before he was inaugurated, with his constitutional proposals that were adopted by approval of the previous and current legislatures.

In El Panama America, a CID/Gallup poll taken a week later showed 28 percent of those surveyed rating Torrijos’s performance as “good,” 15 percent as “very good” and 42 percent as “regular,” with only 15 percent giving the president unfavorable ratings. Because of different methodologies used one can’t treat the Dichter & Neira and CID/Gallup polls as tracking surveys that show a trend, but the two of them combined do suggest that Panamanians are generally not outraged over taxes.

But there are other shoes to drop, so it seems, and people might not be so understanding in those instances. CID/Gallup showed more than 70 percent disapproval among all adult age groups for any increase in the Seguro Social retirement age and 37 percent of those surveyed said that they’d take to the streets to defend their rights if such a thing were proposed. So far the president has not unveiled his Seguro Social reform plan, which will be taken up in a special legislative session.

Then once the legislature gets back into regular session in March, it will likely be considering changes to the laws governing the University of Panama and possibly ratification of a free trade agreement. The former would surely bring the student radicals out onto the streets, but is essentially a non-issue in most Panamanian minds.

But a free trade agreement would not only spark farmer and labor union protests, but it could strike the rawest of public opinion nerves: CID/Gallup found that 56 percent of those responding to its survey citing unemployment as their chief concern, followed by crime in a distant second place at 17 percent and corruption in third at eight percent. If Panamanians are persuaded that an agreement reached with the United States would increase joblessness here, that would probably mean the end of Torrijos’s positive ratings for awhile. But as this story was written the US-Panamanian free trade talks remained deadlocked, reportedly with US demands for Panama to accept more imports of American pork, chicken and rice as the main obstacles to a deal.

It’s standard political procedure in a democracy for a leader to do the unpopular things that he or she believes must be done early in his or her term in office, so that public anger can dissipate well before the next election season comes around. For Torrijos, re-election isn’t the issue but his party’s continued hold on power might be. For legislators, re-election very much is an issue but in this country deputies like to send their alternates to cast unpopular votes, so that they can avoid public blame to the extent that people are so naive as to accept those tactics.

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Torrijos spending his political capital