economy

The PRD got seriously whipped on May 3, losing the presidency by a wide margin and getting so reduced in the next legislature that it will have little room for maneuvers and intrigues. However, the party held onto most of the mayor's offices in Panama (albeit having lost control of the executive branches Panama City and Colon, two of the biggest municipalities). To transfer national government functions to local governments means shifts control of political patronage jobs from a government that the PRD won't control to governments that it will control.

The PRD may be handing over the reins of government to a conservative businessman, but they are pro-privatization and by devolving many government services to local government without giving the municipalities the revenue raising powers to maintain them, they aim to ultimately privatize these public functions, as they did in most places when they "municipalized" solid waste management at the end of the party's 1994-1999 government.

There is bad blood between the PRD and certain public sector unions, most notably those representing teachers, who were defeated by the Torrijos administration in a bitter 2006 strike; and the organizations representing the Social Security and Ministry of Health physicians, who beat Torrijos in a 39-day strike the following year and shifted the national political momentum in a process that led to Martinelli's landslide win this past May. (That's not to say that Martinelli is friends with COMENENAL, the alliance of public sector doctors' unions. That's far from the case.)