THE FIRST, BRIEF POINTS ON THE ELECTIONS - “In this place, so deep in wounded America weeping and sweat flow and the taste of tears drops from the sky”. These verses are by a young Honduran after the coup d’etat four years ago. The coup inspired an endless orchard of poems. The coup also filled the urns with votes for a new party, LIBRE and broke the traditional Honduran two-party system. These are the first, brief points about the electoral work with which there is an intent to close this convulsive political period. by Ismael Moreno The elections of November 24th again have made it clear that the dynamics of the political crises set loose in the country with the coup d’etat of June 28, 2009 continue to be intact. The post-election conditions confirm that the electoral process is not only full of instability but that the elections themselves are expressions of the acute national conflict. MORE PARTICIPATION The atmosphere of frustration among the enthusiastic followers of Xiomara Castro de Zelaya contrasted with the calmness that reigned in the urns the entire day of the electoral Sunday when more that 60% of the electorate with the right to exercise suffrage, a record amount in the country went to the polls. The hope for a triumph for LIBRE and the participation of youth in support of the Anti-Corruption Party (PAC), founded and led by the sports commentator and television host Salvador Nasralla contributed to this high percent of participation. With a year and a half of existence, PAC was able to capture the votes of tens of thousands of youth in the urban areas and in the university ambit in the area of the Sula Valley who voted for the first time. These votes are from a youth that grew up disenchanted with politics or who are interested in soccer, fashion or show business-- not politics. TIME FOR THE RESULTS Before the elections we knew that there was an agreement beforehand: the results would not be given on Sunday, November 24th itself but rather on Monday. Nonetheless, that night Xiomara Castro declared victory with 29% of the votes. Hours later, on Monday, the candidate for the National Party, Juan Orlando Hernández, did the same: declaring himself the victor. In contrast to what generally occurs in the usual triumphal atmosphere in which Honduran elections end, the Nationalists didn’t dare to take to the streets to celebrate. And when three candidates complained that there had been fraud the ambassador of the United States and the missions from the OAS and the European Union pressured for the recognition of the victory of Hernández through elections considered to be calm, with a transparent counting process and reliable results. WAS THERE FRAUD? The official results coincided with 3 of the numbers predicted by all the opinion polls. Only one “failed”. In the polls the LIBRE party came out with 28-29% of the votes. And that’s how it was: they got something over 29%. The percent that the polls had predicted for the Liberal Party (20%) was what it got at the ballot box. And what they had announced the Anti-Corruption Party would receive (15%) coincided with what it obtained in the vote. Different than these three correct figures, the National Party in the polls appeared with a percent of between 26-28%, but in the electoral results it made it to something more than 34% of the votes deposited in the urns. The other five tiny parties - the “screwed” as they are called in the political hallways - they didn’t even get 1% of the votes. Do the percentages from the polls have to do with the electoral fraud that has been denounced? It has to have something to do with it. Many testimonies and indications show a relationship of the growth of the percentage of vote for the National Party with the alarming shrinkage of votes for the small parties: Unificación Democratica, Frente Amplio-Politico Electoral en Resistencia (FAPER) - two parties that participated in an alliance - , Democracia Cristiana, Partido Alianza Patriótica and Partido de Innovación y Unidad (PINU). In each of the 16 thousand polling places that functioned the day of the voting there should have been a representative delegate (delgado proprietario) and an alternate delegate (delagado suplente) for each of the eight candidates competing for the Presidency of the Republic. It was more than obvious that the small parties did not achieve compliance with this requirement. Nonetheless, there were delegates for all of them in all of the polling places. What happened? The National Party paid off the leaders of these parties for the credentials of their delegates in order to give them to members of their party. And delegates of the small parties were bribed so that at the moment of voting they voted for the National Party. This explains something extraordinary: that in thousands of polling places there was not even one single vote deposited in favor of any of these tiny parties, despite the fact that officially they had two representatives at each voting booth. Logically, in each voting booth there should have been at least two votes for each of the small parties, but it wasn’t that way. This tactic caused thousands of votes that should have favored the small parties to be cast in favor of the National Party. And that at many polling stations the delegates from the ruling party conspired with the delegates from the small parties at the moment of the vote count to favor the ruling party candidate. OPENLY BUYING VOTES Vote buying has been an electoral tradition in Honduras. This time too. With the open buying of votes or threats made to many people to vote for the National Party in order not to lose the benefits of the “10 thousand Bonus” - the charity that officially the ruling party gives to its members - the ruling party assured a sufficient number of votes to break the technical tie between the ruling party candidate and the candidate of the LIBRE Party; a tie that was announced for months through the opinion polls, an uncertainty that maintained the expectations of many people and contributed to the massive increase in voters. Envío collected testimony in the electoral centers of various cities in the country that coincide in reporting that activists of the National Party turned over cash to voters in exchange for a confirmed vote in favor of the ruling party candidate. An independent observed confirmed to me, “I saw when a Nationalist activist gave a cell phone to a person who was going to vote. Also I was aware that after voting that person showed the activist the photo that he/she took of their vote in favor of Juan Orlando. Then, the activist gave them a wad of bills, closing the agreed upon transaction”. Through various similar testimonies Envío can confirm that these cases were not exceptions. Activists of the National Party - and, as expected, activists of the other small parties working for the ruling party - offered between 500 and a thousand Lempira - about 25-50 dollars - for each vote. Those who accepted received half the money before going to the urn together with a cell phone to photograph where they marked their vote on the ballot. And upon leaving, when the activist had proof that the person had voted for the ruling party candidate, they paid the other half. AN HISTORIC ACHIEVEMENT Even the cheating and the vote resulting in the victory of the ruling party candidate, doesn’t take away the frontal blow to the backbone of the traditional two-party model that has dominated our country for more than three decades of representative democracy. With Juan Orlando Hernández winning, or if the wife of Manuel Zelaya Rosales had reached victory, the political life of Honduras will not go back to being the same, because it won’t be controlled by a co- government of Liberals and Nationalists. In all of the political campaigns from 1981 to 2009, there were only two possibilities: the Liberal Party wins or the National Party wins. The other parties (two more from 1981-1994 and three after 1997) never had any possibility of victory, achieving among all three together percentages of the vote that never exceeded 4% of the active electorate. THE COMING PACT In the same way, whatever the results, the political moment that opened through the elections will have to be sustained through a political pact for governability between the four forces that have capitalized on the electoral process. It is unthinkable that with Juan Orlando Hernândez in the Presidency, Nationalism will be able to run the public administration of the unstable, violent and insecure Honduran reality on its own. No one has the capacity to govern without alliances or avoiding serious negotiations with the other political sectors in the country. Because in the elections of November 24th what we elected was not so much who will govern Honduras for the next four years but rather who will lead the political pact for governability in conjunction with the other political forces. November 24th ended the traditional Liberal-National co-government. THE END OF AN EPOCH We are entering another epoch. With the elections of November 24th the conjuncture closed that opened on May 22, 2011 with the signing of the Cartegena Agreement which defined the governability pact that the political forces responsible for the coup d’etat would lead. With the triumph of Juan Orlando Hernandez a new conjuncture begins that will need a new political pact, despite the political elites and businessmen who the previous conjuncture continuing in charge of the country and despite the fracturing of the two-party model.