Let no one be fooled about their closeness. José Raúl Mulino, the unexpected favorite in the polls to become president of Panama, visited this election Sunday the disqualified former president Ricardo Martinelli, whom he replaced in extremis on the electoral ballots. The candidate of the Realizing Goals party arrived around 10:00 a.m. at the Nicaraguan embassy in the Panamanian capital, where Martinelli has been holed up since February to avoid the arrest warrant against him, after being sentenced to more than ten years for corruption and money laundering.
In a short video released by their campaign, they are seen hugging each other effusively at the diplomatic headquarters, in the middle of the flashes of the cameras that accompanied the private meeting. The former president’s cap reads the same motto on the candidate’s shirt, omnipresent in campaign advertising: “El loco con Mulino,” in reference to the nickname by which everyone knows Martinelli. “Giving a hug to our fallen friend” was the purpose of the visit, Murilo said early in the morning in a meeting with the press. “It is in those moments when one is a friend. Definitely, the campaign proved it to me, he is a very loved man on a very depressed social and economic level, very hit by the situation,” he added.
Only until this Friday, a few hours before elections that are defined in a single round, Panama’s highest court dispelled the uncertainty by finally endorsing the appointment of Mulino, originally Martinelli’s vice-presidential formula. The Supreme Court of Justice decided only then that “the previous decision of the electoral authorities to replace Martinelli for his number two. It is an unprecedented situation, since Murilo does not have a candidate for vice presidency. His main contenders include another former president, Martín Torrijos, as well as Rómulo Roux, of Cambio Democrático, Martinelli’s original party, and Ricardo Lombana, the anti-establishment candidate who champions the fight against corruption. All three call for a comeback, fueled by the high number of undecided people. “I feel that there are going to be surprises, that what is reflected in the polls is not what is happening,” former President Torrijos told this newspaper when remembering that Panamanians come from two elections in which the final result has been different than what the discredited surveys expressed.
From the Nicaraguan embassy, located in a quiet middle-class neighborhood in Panama City, Martinelli has starred in the elections by openly promoting Mulino, who was his Minister of Security, and even recorded a video for the closing of the campaign, where They reserved an empty chair for him on the stage. The former supermarket magnate governed Panama between 2009 and 2014, at a time of economic growth and multimillion-dollar investments in infrastructure such as the Panama City metro, the first in Central America. Thanks to that memory he remains popular despite his multiple judicial problems, which he attributes to political persecution, and being singled out by United States as a corrupt former ruler. Aside from the legal entanglement, Mulino immersed himself in the campaign with the strategy of attracting voters with the promise of returning to the good times.
In the enormous Atlapa convention center in Panama City, the voting place with the highest participation in the country, with more than 25,000 qualified voters, there are an abundance of caps that retain the Martinelli-Mulino 2024 logo, which blend with the t-shirts of the other candidates and also with the advertising of candidates for local positions, since Panamanians elect, in addition to the president and vice president, deputies to the National Assembly, mayors and councilors. In this electoral college, both the president, Laurentino Cortizo, of the PRD, who leaves power with very low popularity ratings, and Mulino and Lombana vote. At the exit, no one seems to have time, many of the voters dodge the journalists’ questions and the majority remember that the vote is secret, a reminder of the high number of undecided voters to which the polls alluded.
“I don’t understand Mulino’s favoritism,” says Susana Dávila, a couch 41-year-old health worker who comes this morning wearing a t-shirt with the motto “my vote is my voice.” “If the polls were right, and that is confirmed, in my opinion the country has not understood well what Martinelli’s Government consisted of; They believe it was prosperous but really not, there was clearly a looting of the national coffers and the people perhaps have not understood it,” she assesses minutes after having cast her vote for Roux. Javier Zapata, a 23-year-old sports journalist who arrives dressed in the red shirt of the soccer team, fears the uncertainty that Mulino could bring, due to Martinelli’s bad record in his relationship with the United States, and opted for Lombana, who cultivates support among young people. “It seems to me, as they say, that he is the least bad. If we start comparing candidates, they all have bad annexes,” he says with resignation.
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