Tomorrow is going to be a day of disappointment for the vast majority of presidential candidates. Of the 35 who have been fighting for months to earn a place in the second round, 33 will be left out and wondering when their sure race to power went off the rails and left them dancing on a deserted stage in a witch doctor costume and with their hair dyed an impossible black. Because, although we know otherwise, they all believe that their march towards the Palace is inexorable. Or at least they believed it until the polls – those instruments of the devil that insist on contradicting the electoral flat earthers – began to bring them unpleasant news about what was happening out there, far from the fairy atmosphere of their campaign commandos. Paradoxically, however, some of those candidates are going to fall prey to disenchantment for the opposite reason. This is, because at a certain point in the competition the polls showed them that they had made a jump in their intention to vote as citizens and then, with the inflated self-esteem that usually characterizes those who get involved in these pursuits, they felt that the bewitched gang was beginning to materialize on their chest and they began to distribute ministries… They forgot, of course, that jumps produce only ephemeral elevations (‘hiccups’ is what they are called in these statistical matters). And, above all, that the Peruvian electorate is cruel by nature. That is to say, his adherence to the postulations that arise along the way is fickle and that he enjoys elevating guys full of ambition and pomp for a brief moment, and then making them roll in the dust. A hobby that, in the opinion of this small column, responds to a certain spirit of revenge.
Tomorrow is going to be a day of disappointment for the vast majority of presidential candidates. Of the 35 who have been fighting for months to earn a place in the second round, 33 will be left out and wondering when their sure race to power went off the rails and left them dancing on a deserted stage in a witch doctor costume and with their hair dyed an impossible black. Because, although we know otherwise, they all believe that their march towards the Palace is inexorable. Or at least they believed it until the polls – those instruments of the devil that insist on contradicting the electoral flat earthers – began to bring them unpleasant news about what was happening out there, far from the fairy atmosphere of their campaign commandos. Paradoxically, however, some of those candidates are going to fall prey to disenchantment for the opposite reason. This is, because at a certain point in the competition the polls showed them that they had made a jump in their intention to vote as citizens and then, with the inflated self-esteem that usually characterizes those who get involved in these pursuits, they felt that the bewitched gang was beginning to materialize on their chest and they began to distribute ministries… They forgot, of course, that jumps produce only ephemeral elevations (‘hiccups’ is what they are called in these statistical matters). And, above all, that the Peruvian electorate is cruel by nature. That is to say, his adherence to the postulations that arise along the way is fickle and that he enjoys elevating guys full of ambition and pomp for a brief moment, and then making them roll in the dust. A hobby that, in the opinion of this small column, responds to a certain spirit of revenge.
The voters of the melancholic region that we inhabit, in fact, will not be readers of Dante, but they still abandon all hope when they reach the doors of that hell that is the secret chamber. They, for the most part, have on so many occasions endorsed their support for those who promised to change everything and then leave things intact or worse than they were, that now they do not really believe in either the ‘outsiders’ or the ‘anti-establishment’. Their experience teaches them that, as soon as they settle into the presidential chair, they transform into what they previously bitterly reviled. Consequently, we fear, voting becomes simply an act of venting. In a way of putting on the throne the worst nightmare of those who arrogantly hold power at that moment… and then also repudiate these new occupants of the throne and punish them in the following elections. Election day thus turns out to be a day of fury, and the polls and simulations, the general rehearsals of what will happen there. In front of their interrogators, the respondents play at lifting up the deluded person on duty for a few days and then watch him collapse with malevolent complacency. These applicants are something like “the flavor of the week”, but in the midst of their dalliances of greatness they are incapable of understanding it. The hiccup that had them as protagonists creates a winners’ complex that, in the long run, makes the meager harvest they reap at the polls more humiliating and causes tantrums after defeat. We will undoubtedly have some of that starting Monday.
In the meantime, we will have to wait to see who catches the hiccups on Sunday and pray that, for the second round, the unconscious that resides in each of us does not insist on exalting him for the sole pleasure of seeing him later fall victim to his own vileness.
*El Comercio opens its pages to the exchange of ideas and reflections. In this plural framework, the Diario does not necessarily agree with the opinions of the columnists who sign them, although it always respects them.
