DOMINICAN ELECTIONS #14: POST-ELECTION REFORMS ON

UNCLAS SANTO DOMINGO 001938

SIPDIS

SIPDIS

STATE FOR WHA, WHA/CAR, WHA/EPSC, INR/IAA; NSC FOR FISK AND
FEARS; USSOUTHCOM ALSO FOR POLAD; USDOC FOR
4322/ITA/MAC/WH/CARIBBEAN BASIN DIVISION; USDOC FOR
3134/ITA/USFCS/RD/WH; DHS FOR CIS-CARLOS ITURREGUI

E.O. 12958: N/A
TAGS: PGOV DR KCOR
SUBJECT: DOMINICAN ELECTIONS #14: POST-ELECTION REFORMS ON
AGENDA

REF: SANTO DOMINGO 1898 (NOTAL)


1. (U) This is the 14th cable in a series reporting on the
Dominican Republic's May 16 congressional and municipal
elections:

Post-Election Reforms on the Dominican Agenda

During the campaign President Fernandez asserted that the
PRD-PRSC opposition was using its "tyrannical majority" in
Congress for partisan advantage instead of national
interests. Now the electorate has handed his PLD its own
congressional majority. Dominicans will expect Fernandez to
use his enhanced power to pursue the national agenda that he
advocated in his campaign platform and further articulated
since 2004.


PLD Victory Confirmed
- - - - - - - - - - -

By June 8 the Central Elections Board (JCE) confirmed
virtually all the election results that had been
provisionally announced in late May, with only slight
modifications. The ruling PLD has its sweeping victory in
Congress and an unprecedented advance in municipalities. The
PLD won majorities in both houses of Congress and a large
plurality of municipal governments.

The election ended the opposition's legislative dominance and
for the first time gave the PLD a solid municipal base. The
Senate lineup will be 22 for the ruling PLD, 6 for the PRD,
and 4 for the PRSC, giving the government a two-thirds
majority necessary to pass constitutional amendments, on the
expectation that the PLD's traditional discipline holds. The
House of Representatives will have 96 PLD members, 60 from
the PRD, and 22 from the PRSC, giving President Fernandez the
relative majority to pass ordinary legislation. Of the 151
municipal governments, 67 will be led by PLD mayors, 52 by
PRD mayors, 28 by the PRSC, and 4 by minor parties. The
ruling PLD and its allies won 52 percent of approximately 3
million votes cast; the PRD-PRSC alliance altogether received
about 45 percent and independent minor parties the rest.

Turnout of 56 percent of the 5.4 million registered voters
set a record for mid-term elections.


Reforming institutions
- - - - - - - - - - - -

As soon as the shape of the victory was clear, political
leaders, civil society spokespersons, and religious leaders
were proposing reform agendas for the new Congress to convene
August 16. President Fernandez called for a constitutional
and institutional reform, based largely on the PLD's 2004
presidential campaign platform -- an A-to-Z document of more
than 150 pages published on the Internet. The PLD political
committee, chaired by Fernandez, set up two committees to
advance reform proposals: one led by presidential chief of
staff Danilo Medina to serve as liaison with both houses of
Congress, and the other chaired by Interior Secretary
Franklin Almeyda to interface with municipalities. Two newly
elected PLD legislators told political officer May 25 that
these committees demonstrated the president's seriousness in
wanting to involve all of Dominican society. Medina promised
publicly that the PLD would not use its enhanced power "to
make vassals of its opponents."

Catholic University PUCMM rector Msgr. Agripino Nunez and

others cautioned against rushing to amend the constitution,
an impulse that in the past was often driven by short-term
partisan motives. Current Attorney General and senator-elect
Francisco Dominguez Brito (PLD, Santiago) said any
constitutional revision should be aimed at strengthening
institutions such as the career judiciary, the National
Judicial Council which chooses Supreme Court judges, the
Comptroller General, and the Chamber of Accounts (analogous
to the U.S. General Accounting Office). He advocated
continuing his initiative of creating a career corps of
prosecutors to assure more efficient administration of
criminal justice.

Influential figures in the main opposition PRD are also
mulling reforms. Meeting with political officer June 1,
reelected Congressman Henry Sarraff (PRD, Independencia) said
he believed Congress should convene a convention to rewrite
the constitution He thinks one goal would be to make the
branches of government more independent. The judges of the
Central Election Board (JCE) and the Chamber of Accounts and
some members of the National Judicial Council could be
elected by a two-thirds vote of a joint session of Congress.
Sarraff thinks, rightly, that the current system of
appointment by two-thirds of the Senate allows imposition of
partisan judges by the dominant party. (The shoe is now on
the other foot.) He thinks the JCE should be reduced from 9
judges to 5 to streamline its procedures, returning to the
system of the mid-1990s. (The reform that stacked the JCE
with 9 judges and altered responsibilities was a short-term
tactic to overcome an ornery head judge.) The 1997 electoral
law also needs revision, in his view.

Such changes will be resisted by many legislators who depend
on the traditional spoils system to build support. More
judicial independence would also reinforce the fight against
corruption -- a trend that not all Dominican congressmen
would welcome. For example, one re-elected representative is
Radhames Ramos Garcia of La Vega,convicted by the Supreme
Court of alien smuggling and fresh from nine months of jail
time; another newly elected legislator is Miguel Vsquez, a
corrupt former migration director general in the Mejia
administration. Vasquez was convicted in March and sentenced
to two years' imprisonment for having extorted USD 44,000
from two of the illegal immigrants trafficked by Ramos
Garcia, who at the time was serving as a consul in Haiti.

Former attorney general Virgilio Bello Rosa recommends
curbing the president's discretion to use public resources
for partisan purposes, participate personally in
congressional and municipal campaigns, or simultaneously hold
a post as party president -- all of which he accused
President Fernandez of doing. Bello Rosa, like Sarraff,
called for a constitutional convention to decide on these and
other institutional changes. He also urged the PLD to go
beyond legal changes to attack high living costs, corruption,
and illiteracy,

President Fernandez outlined to the Ambassador his own views
on reform, reported in reftel.


Fighting corruption and electrical blackouts
- - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - -

Many hope that Fernandez will use his strengthened mandate
both administratively and legislatively to address the
nation's problems. The opposition and civil society have
been demanding that he act more vigorously against
malfeasance in both the public and private sectors. His
establishment of a National Ethics and Anti-Corruption

Commission in April 2005 appears to have been merely
decorative. A long-delayed bill to modernize public
procurement and contracting procedures tops a list of meeded
legislation that Congress has not yet acted on. Many are
calling for action to solve the longstanding structural
problems of the nation's electric power system. World Bank
resident representative Christina Malmberg stressed in a May
31 speech that both corruption and the uncertain electricity
system undermine the economy's competitiveness.


Implementing DR-CAFTA
- - - - - - - - - - -

The free-trade agenda is urgent, if the country is to
continue attracting foreign investment. Dominican officials
are just beginning to acknowledge the list of laws,
administrative measures, and practices that must be revised
for DR-CAFTA to go into effect. If talks with USTR drag out
until past mid-August, as appears likely, the PLD's
legislative majorities will give Fernandez the leverage to
get the job done -- if he decides to resist special interests
that still stand in the way. The bill to require open
tenders for most government purchases and contracts, already
approved by the Senate but pending in the lower house, will
need revision to fulfill the relevant DR-CAFTA requirements.
Also needed are measures to safeguard pharamaceutical
patents. to modify protection for Dominican agents of U.S.
enterprises, and to ensure number portability among
telecommunications providers.


Investing in people
- - - - - - - - - -

Fixing the nation's broken public education and health
systems are longer-term, often-postponed tasks that would
benefit most Dominicans and boost development. Dominican
politicians of all parties regularly invoke this agenda. The
PLD victory deprives the ruling party of a number of fiscal
excuses for 2007 in this regard.


Reforming election procedures
- - - - - - - - - - - - - - -

Electoral law reform is on many voters' minds as the public
waits for the JCE finish adjucating challenges to the
election results. On May 25 prominent NGO Foundation for
Institutionalism and Justice (FINJUS) sponsored a roundtable
that evaluated the 2006 electoral experience and proposals
for improvement. Those who spoke were unanimous in demanding
more selective recruitment and better training of poll
workers, so as to reduce delays due to poorly tabulated
voting returns. More than half the tally sheets prepared
manually by the poll workers at the more than 12,000
precincts had simple arithmetic and format errors that
precluded entry of the results into the computer system until
the sheets were corrected. Participants rejected electronic
voting as a solution, apparently out of a belief that
Dominican voters are not ready for such an innovation.

Participants reiterated the calls to change the selection
process for electoral judges so as to ensure their
impartiality, reduce their number, and either assign dispute
resolution to a separate tribunal or allow appeal of such JCE
decisions to the Supreme Court. Some advocated reducing
costs by holding all elections in the same year, instead of
holding congressional and municipal elections in the middle
of the president's term. Several suggested an increasing

sophistication among Dominican voters and a trend to vote for
individual candidates rather than for party lists. This
might argue for separate ballots for Senate and House, as
well as individual election of municipal authorities rather
than using municipal party slates.

Cardinal Nicolas de Jesus Lopez Rodriguez and Papal Nuncio
Timothy Broglio separately called for JCE judges to be fewer
and non-partisan, and the Cardinal, in his typical absolutist
style, proposed limiting election campaigns to 15 days to
save resources for more urgent social priorities.


Restructuring political parties
- - - - - - - - - - - - - - - -

Beyond the electoral concerns lies whether the law should
address political party structures, to require more
democratic internal procedures such as primaries for choosing
candidates and party officials and to create a requirement
for transparency in party and campaign financing. National
Coucil of Private Enterprise president Elena Viyella
commented that the problems with incompetent poll workers
mirrored the internal weakness of the political parties. She
advocated putting more substance into the campaigns, a point
soon to be addressed on a website (www.conocer.com).

The hollow authority of political parties is illustrated by
the opposition PRD-PRSC alliance, which promised to promote a
"national project" and instructed its candidates to announce
their proposals in the campaign. The vague talk of a project
failed to galvanize voters. The PRD held no more than its
historical share, with 31 percent of the national vote for
Congress and 33 percent at municipal level. The third-ranked
PRSC remained crushed. Its candidate scored 9 percent in 2004
and this year the PRSC got 11 percent of the vote for
Congress and 13 percent for municipalities.

These parties will need a more convincing vision to recover
their credibility. In 2004 the PRD lost because of the vote
against Mejia and his financial crisis; this time it lost
because of the clear vote in favor of Fernandez and the
improvements he has delivered.

The PRD already has a hustling presidential candidate for

2008. Former public works secretary Miguel Vargas Maldonado
published paid ads June 2 blaming "those who erratically led
our party," implicitly calling for replacement of current
PRD president Ramon Albuquerque and secretary general Orlando
Jorge Mera. At a dinner for visiting former WHA assistant
secretary Noriega on June 1, Vargas and senior PRD

SIPDIS
legislators waved the specter of loss of public confidence
opening the way for a Dominican equivalent of Hugo Chavez
(not a very likely scenario for the next few years). Vargas
has organized working groups in the PRD around the country to
promote his own presidential candidacy in 2008. Coming out
of a Mejia cabinet not too long ago, he will have a challenge
in convincing party regulars and the people that he is more
than just old PRD vintage politics in a new bottle.


2. (U) Drafted by Bainbridge Cowell.


3. (U) This piece and others in our series can be consulted
at our SIPRNET web site
(http://www.state.sgov.gov/p/wha/santodomingo) along with
extensive other material.
KUBISKE