The reason for this system was to allow voters to rectify the decision of the parties as to the order of preference on their lists. This, it was thought, would be a way to counteract the influence of the party hierarchies which draw up the lists, giving the voter the possibility of correcting the partisan processes at work in the selection of candidates. In practice, however, the preferential vote turned out to be a perverse system that transfers the electoral contest to within the congressional lists, since each candidate tries to win the voter’s preference for himself rather than for his co-candidates.
In order to mitigate the bad effects of this practice, we drew up a little booklet with suggestions that set forth in didactic style the sore points in the system; it was distributed to our candidates in Libertad. In it, Lucho Bustamante, Jorge Salmón, Freddy Cooper, and I asked them not to promise anything in their publicity campaigns that I myself didn’t promise and not to go in for lies and contradictions. Since the CADE conference, the entire election campaign had been a massive attack against our program by Apristas and Socialists and they shouldn’t give our adversaries a chance to demolish what we had built up. It was also important to avoid wasting money. Jorge Salmón taught them about the risks of saturating TV screens with spot ads.
It was as if we’d been preaching to the deaf. A mere handful — less than ten, in any event — took the trouble to organize their campaign by coordinating what they said in their pitch to the voters with our Plan for Governing. I do not except from this charge the candidates of Libertad, several of whom shared responsibility for the excesses committed.
From January 9, when the Lima daily papers devoted an entire page to a full-face photo of Alberto Borea Odría, a PPC candidate for a Senate seat, until the end of March — that is to say, until a few days before the elections — the campaign for the preferential vote of our candidates kept growing, oppressively and anarchically, until it reached extremes that made me laugh and at the same time repelled me. “If what they are doing disgusts me all this much,” I said over and over again to Patricia, “what must the reaction of the man in the street be to such a spectacle?”
All the private television channels spewed out images of the faces of our candidates from morning till night, in ads in which the squandering of money often went hand in hand with bad taste, and in which many of them offered everything imaginable and unimaginable, without its mattering to them that this was in flagrant contradiction to the most elementary principles of that liberal philosophy which, I kept saying, was the one that was ours, and even contradicted common sense. Some promised public works and others price controls and the creation of new public services, but most of them didn’t offer any ideas whatsoever and limited themselves to promoting their face and their number on the list, in a strident voice, and as repetitively as a jackhammer. One senatorial candidate had his image enhanced by an aria from an operetta sung by a baritone, and a candidate for the Chamber of Representatives, to show his love for the people, appeared among the big backsides of mulattas dancing to Afro rhythms; another one was shown weeping, surrounded by elderly little men and women whose lot he sympathized with in a tremulous voice.
The propaganda of the Front’s candidates made such a clean sweep of the audiovisual media that, in February and the beginning of March, they gave the impression that they were the only ones who existed, and that their opponents on the other lists had disappeared, or made such sporadic appearances that they looked like pygmies competing with giants or, more precisely, victims of starvation confronting millionaires.
Alan García appeared on TV to explain that he had made a calculation, according to which a number of Democratic Front candidates for seats in the Senate or in the Chamber of Representatives had now spent more money in TV spots than they would earn in their five years in office if they were elected. Were they subsidized, then, by oligarchic groups, whose interests they were going to defend in the National Congress against those of the Peruvian people? How were those members of Congress going to pay back their generous patrons?
Although President García didn’t seem to be the ideal person to voice such scruples, it must have lingered in the minds of many people that all that excessive advertising concealed something shady. And other voters, those in the highlands, those who don’t make analyses, those who follow their impulses, must simply have been indignant at that arrogant demonstration of economic power and suppressed the enthusiasm they had felt at the beginning for what appeared to be a proposal that was new and untouched by corruption. Many of those candidates were not new, but rather the cream of the crop of sharp political schemers, and of one or another of them it could not even be said that he had clean hands, since his passage through the previous administration had left behind him a wake that discredited him.
From the first opinion polls taken by the Sawyer/Miller Group it was evident that that extravagant publicity had had a negative impact on voters with small incomes, those into whose heads the official propaganda hammered the slogan that I was the candidate of the rich. What better parading of wealth than the ads that turned up on their television screens? All that might have been won in the previous year and a half with my preaching in favor of a liberal reform was lost in just days and weeks in the face of that assault of repeated appearances, ads, posters, which monopolized TV screens, radios, walls, newspapers, and magazines. In the midst of that vast and confusing overabundance in which the emblem of the Democratic Front — a pre-Hispanic staircase shown in profile — was used to promote the most contradictory proposals and formulas, my message lost its air of reform and of change. And my image as a person was confused with that of professional politicians and those who acted as though they were.
In February the opinion polls showed a decrease in the number of those intending to vote for me. One of only a few points, but one that brought me further away from the 50 percent necessary to win in the first round of balloting. Freddy Cooper summoned the congressional candidates of the Democratic Front to a meeting. He explained to them what was happening and suggested that they put a stop to the spots. Only a handful of candidates showed up. And Freddy had to confront a sort of mutiny; candidates of the Christian Popular Party and of Popular Action told him, without mincing words, that they refused to accept his request, since it would favor the candidates of Libertad, who had begun their campaigns before their allies in the Democratic Front. As this was happening I was touring the departamento of Lambayeque, in the North, so that it was only on my return to Lima that I was informed of the matter. I met with Belaunde and Bedoya, whom I assured that if we didn’t put a stop to this extravagant publicity we would lose the elections. Both of them asked me to bring the subject up for discussion in the executive council of the Front, which meant losing several days.
In the meeting of the council the internal weakness of the alliance was evident. The explanations of the head of the campaign, with the results of the opinion surveys concerning the disastrous effect of the publicity on the preferential vote in hand, did not move the members, almost all of whom were candidates for the Senate or the Chamber of Representatives. In the name of the Christian Popular Party, Senator Felipe Osterling explained that many of the candidates of his party had waited until the final weeks of the campaign to launch their publicity and that to subject them to restrictions now would be unjust and discriminatory, and that, moreover, we ran the risk of being disobeyed. And in the name of Popular Action, Senator Gastón Acurio put forward similar reasons and another one, which many of those present agreed with: cutting down on our advertising meant leaving the field free for the list of independents headed by the banker Francisco Pardo Mesones, which, in fact, was also churning out a great deal. Those on the list headed by Pardo Mesones used the slogan “We’re free,” and Acurio made the executive council laugh by referring to it as “We’re rich.” Were we going to silence our candidates and hand the bankers of “We’re rich” their seats in Congress on a platter? The upshot was that a utopian agreement was adopted that merely urged the candidates to cut down on their advertising.