Costa Rica’s elected president, Rodrigo Chaves, surprised many with the strong change of mood that he has shown immediately after his electoral victory – from a disruptive and anti-systemic speech to another conciliatory and unitary one, like the one delivered to receive the next the defeated candidate, José María Figueres.
However, this change of attitude did not prevent him from showing his unorthodox view of government formation and the functioning of public administration management. Reproducing the way of selecting personnel from private entities and international organizations, Chaves sought to form a government beyond the party system and without prioritizing the government program with which he went to the elections.
The basic point is that the proposals of the elected president, made from a technocratic perspective, although proposed with all good will, carry serious risks to the performance of democracy. It is not just a matter of specific changes in current regulations or institutions, but also in the conceptual foundations on which the democratic system is based.
It may be that such approaches have to do with a question of knowledge, since Chaves knows much more about economics than political sociology, and I am not talking about institutionalist political science, but about the approach that also contemplates the relationship between rulers and ruled, as well as the civic and political culture of citizens.
When taking this issue to the current conjuncture, the question of the role of parties in the formation of government becomes particularly relevant. As is well known, parties have suffered a major deterioration in terms of their communicative intermediation function, especially since the emergence of social networks. But their role as political actors has also been relativized. In fact, they are no longer alone as important agents of the political system.
However, the devaluation is less with regard to the classic function of parties, which is to provide directive and technical staff to the government administration. Above all, they have been criticized for becoming electoral and staffing machines by losing relevance in other fields.
In any case, this role of political parties refers to a key element in the functioning of the democratic system: the organic maintenance of the so-called programmatic commitment that must exist at the heart of the political system.
In Costa Rica, as in other countries in the region with a presidential regime, electoral legislation requires parties contesting the elections to present a government program. This not only refers to the definition of its programmatic profile, but also constitutes the base on which the National Development Plan of the incoming government will be configured.
Thus, the government program of the elected candidate is designed as a fundamental matrix of government action after the elections. In short, a normative and institutional process is thus established that seeks to guarantee citizens that electoral promises are not carried away by the wind.
The president is within his right to say that in order to elect his ministers he will not ask them which party they voted for. But he should ask them a simple question: do you know the government program in which I ran for election?
Because this constitutes the basis on which the Chaves government must act in the various areas of government performance. Otherwise, the president-elect would be deceiving the people who elected him and the country as a whole.
In the same way, when the president-elect assures that he will constitute his government free of ties and compromises, he is telling a half-truth. He has an unwavering commitment to his government program and a promise to implement it.
In this context, the role of parties is multiple. First of all, it means the incarnation in people and organic mechanisms of the presented government program. It is the guarantee that the electoral proposal is not intangible or unipersonal. On the one hand, it presupposes that the government program is not the product of unilateral occurrences, but that it is the result of a collective process embodied in organic structures.
Furthermore, the party embodies a certain ideological proposal that must offer voters a general reference of what the government’s orientation will be. In the case of the Chaves program, it is indicated that it belongs to “modern social democracy”. And no matter how difficult it is to specify what this classification means, the important thing is that it shows signs of identity that citizens can recognize. The explanation of the party profile provides something fundamental for the functioning of democracy: it facilitates the possibility of electing.
Candidate Chaves insisted in his campaign that traditional parties had become political and family plots, lacking in internal democracy and prone to corruption. And he was not without reason. But a party without these scourges, composed of people who share a set of political and programmatic ideas, represents the ideal space to supply the public administration with hierarchies and cadres.
Choosing high positions within the political party that won the elections means taking advantage of a space of trust and security to carry out the government’s program.
Of course, this should not be an obstacle to electing other people who are not from the party, if they demonstrate that they have greater competence. But the formula of seeking excellence outside the community of partisan ideas and on the fringes of programmatic commitment, using methods of selecting personnel from private entities, although it seems like a good technocratic solution (which could be imitated in the rest of the region), can generate instability. and unnecessary disruption, as in countries where parties are ephemeral.
Party organization is necessary. But this should lead to reform of the party system, not its elimination. Not only because the parties are fundamental political actors according to the Constitution, but because, although they are not alone, they represent the guarantee of fundamental rights such as the right to association, which basically supposes the protection of pluralist democracy.
In this way, far from being proud of the lack of party solidity, the elected president should present to the country a proposal to heal the political parties and reconfigure the system of parties and political representations. Parties are not only the organic and human incarnation of programmatic commitment, but represent the possibility that a government proposal will be projected over time.
The elected president should be aware that he has a set of socio-political reforms and actions ahead of him, among which is the strengthening of a party system that strengthens Costa Rica’s pluralist democracy.
Rather, it should take the opportunity to consolidate the Social Democratic Progress Party as a robust political organization that will allow it to maintain its government proposals beyond the next four years, which, as you should know, will fly by.
