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Franz Wever doesn't quite get by without opposition
by Eric Jackson

Ah, what a faction fight!

Franz Wever, who enjoys immunity from prosecution because he's a member of the National Assembly, survived the Electoral Prosecutor's attempt to strip away that protection because in 2004 he was caught buying votes outside a polling place, and because it is suspected that he had some role in addition to beneficiary when it turned out that there were more votes counted than cast in his legislative circuit that year. Now it's the Attorney General who's asking the Supreme Court to lift his immunity, so that he can face investigation and possible trial for embezzlement along with others with whom he served on the Panamanian Olympic Committee.

Wever just barely got back into office last time, and the next time his Panama City legislative circuit is being combined with another to encompass areas where hardly anybody knows of him, outside of what they read about the scandals swirling about him. So what's a national baseball czar who's being shunned by Major League Baseball for his racist comments and who single-handedly got Panama's national team kicked out of the world baseball championships by neglecting a $6 grand insurance payment to do?

Move out to the beach, of course. Wever is running for re-election not in Panama City, but in Circuit 8-3, a single-member area that encompasses the districts of Chame and San Carlos. He put all the resources of the Panamanian baseball world behind his bid, but the problem is that former big league outfielder and former national team manager Omar Moreno has a lot more credibility than Wever and Moreno's leading a movement to oust Wever and his backers from organized baseball, and when Wever managed to get a junior tournament game moved to Chame and had himself introduced, the crowd booed and he had to forget about giving a speech.

It took two weeks for the PRD to announce the results of its January 20 internal elections, and when they did it was far from clear that he had won enough delegates to take control of the party organization for Circuits 8-2 (Capira) and 8-3 from the incumbent, Amado Cerrud.

Wever's advantage wasn't the votes, it was his immunity. Cerrud had no such protection, and on December 18 a court handed him a three-year prison term for pilfering the resources of the Ministry of Public Works. Wever moved to impugn the right of his opponent to run and the party's honor committee ruled in his favor.

So Wever runs unopposed and wins by default, right?

Not quite. Cerrud contested his disqualification, his suplente Ricardo Castillo was ready to run in his place if Cerrud couldn't, and the party rescheduled the vote for February 14 while it mulled Cerrud's appeal.

Cerrud then appealed to the Electoral Tribunal and, on the day that the vote was to happen, the three magistrates --- one of them the former Electoral Prosecutor who had unsuccessfully attempted to pursue Wever for the 2004 voting irregularities --- called of the local party congress pending further proceedings.

This still may not save Cerrud's career as a Panama Oeste party boss, but it gave the delegates who would prefer not to have Wever as his successor more time to organize their resistance.

On their face, the party regulations do block Cerrud's candidacy and moreover would allow for his expulsion from the PRD. But the man does have friends and Wever does have enemies, and if because these people don't share the same conviction of their main man Cerrud they and other delegates not owned by the baseball czar are able to vote down Wever's challenge, the local election's result may well affect some other things, starting with the results of the March 9 national PRD convention.

How could that be?

Well, it turns out that the balance of power in the PRD, if one is to judge by the January 20 party election results, lies not in the hands of President Torrijos or the two likely candidates for the party's 2009 presidential nomination, Panama City Mayor Juan Carlos Navarro or former President Ernesto Pérez Balladares. Representantes and other local party leaders whose influence had previously been discounted by party bosses, and whose ultimate loyalties are not well known, ruined the easy fix. Now the resources of the national government are being used to entice them into the president's corner but the problems with that is that any job that Torrijos can hand out lasts a year and a half max and both Toro Pérez Balladares and Juan Carlos Navarro have the private resources to make offers of their own if it comes to that.

Do the polls tell you this or that? Look at the questions that are asked, and who is asked them, before you decide what to believe. President Torrijos may have higher approval ratings at this point in his term than any of the other post-dictatorship presidents, but the PRD rank-and-file are largely treating him as a lame duck. In the small world of Panama Oeste PRD rivalries and in the larger political life of the republic as a whole, that makes for a much more fluid situation than yesterday's conventional wisdom expected.