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Rival claims about who won the PRD elections
by Eric Jackson

So how did it turn out? One candidate for party president, Housing Minister Balbina Herrera, said that factions supporting her had won 95 percent of the delegate positions. The campaign committee for her opponent in that race, former President Ernesto "Toro" Pérez Balladares, said that people pledged to him had won 52 to 56 percent of the 4,200 convention delegates. Panama City Mayor Juan Carlos Navarro, who stepped aside in the race for the party presidency in favor of Balbina but has a faction and a slate of delegates of his own, said that his slate had taken about 40 percent of the delegates, Balbina's and Toro's groups had split another 45 percent of the posts between them, and smaller party factions had won the remaining 15 percent or so of the races.

It was a high turnout as these things go --- nearly 45 percent of the more than half-million Democratic Revolutionary Party members --- because it's the prelude to a battle for control of the ruling party. There will be a primary for the party's 2009 presidential nomination but the party convention will elect a National Executive Committee that will establish its rules. If Toro wins his race for the party presidency against Balbina, that would be a sign that he'll be hard to stop for the nomination.

Balbina's announced intention is to run for mayor of Panama City, not president. If things go as expected Toro's main opponent in the primary will be Mayor Navarro. Lost in the shuffle, so it would seem, are any ambitions that President Torrijos may have had to pick next year's standard bearer or control the party after his time in office.

Or are they lost? Although the voting took place on January 20, as of the afternoon of January 22 the party still hadn't announced who won the delegate races. Some of the daily newspapers were reporting that a number of prominent PRD members --- PARLACEN deputies Julio Palacios and Aldo López Tirone, party second secretary candidate Humberto López Tirone, former Minister of Government and Justice Raúl Montenegro and former legislator Olivia de Pomares were among the losers in their respective races, and first reports were that Panama City Carnival director Mingthoy Giro had also lost her bid to become a delegate. But wait! There are the "residues" in a complicated proportional representation system among party slates and there was still a hope that Giro might be able to slip into the March convention that way. The delayed announcement of results and the conflicting claims either mean that under Martín Torrijos the PRD is so inefficient that it can't get the nuts and bolts of a party election right --- which we already know from the 17 correigimientos where the voting had to be postponed --- or that something more sinister is going on.

For most of last year Torrijos and the first lady had been promoting Vice President Samuel Lewis Navarro as their preferred 2009 presidential candidate. However, even with a bit of open mudslinging and a lot of whispered trash talk about his cousin the mayor, Lewis Navarro has never been able to excite any significant support for the idea of his presidency, either within the party or in the public at large. That option, which would imply a massive manipulation within a party now showing itself to be increasingly fractious, appears to have been taken off of the table. Still, if the mayor's numbers are even remotely accurate and the party elections aren't outright stolen on a massive scale, no faction holds a majority and there is thus room for the president to maneuver, twist arms, offer incentives and make deals.

The next phase of the PRD power struggle is the official nominations for National Executive Committee and party officers, with the contests for those to be decided by the delegates at a March 9 national congress.