Welcome to a year of slings, arrows and outrageous rhetoric

WITH the  presidential candidates for the three major parties now in place, look forward to daily political sniping as the individuals weigh up the opposition and decide where to aim their verbal arrows.

As in many election campaigns rhetoric may turn out to be more focused on pogroms aimed at the opposition than programs for the electorate.
While the PRD and the Panamenista Party and its ally the PP have signed on to an agreement for a ”clean” campaign, the CD has stayed outside the pale.
After José Domingo Arias easily won the CD primary on Sunday, President Ricardo Martinelli who founded and heads the party, quickly moved to say that the PRD would be rushing for two well-known pharmacy drugs to fight diarrhea as they realized who they had to face.
Panamenista leader, and the country’s vice-president Juan Carlos Varela, described Arias as “a musician without his own song” whothanked the president 14 times during his victory speech.
PRD hopeful Juan Carlos Navarro, who was twice mayor of Panama, survived some bitter infighting within the party before winning his chance to grab thr sceptre, has downplayed Arias as a political neophyte but, in the meantime, the PRD filed an electoral criminal complaint against the CD stating that the party and the candidate were using state resources in the campaign.

Blowing their own trumpet with state funds has been a "strategy" of every government I have witnessed running for re-election in half a dozen countries.

Arias brushed off the complaint saying the opposition party fears his candidacy.
"They will continue [filing complaints] because they are really worried and fearful, they are seeing that this nomination has strength they have not seen in a long time," he said, implying say some observers that he is a stronger man than Martinelli.
His statements came during a lunch with Romulo Roux and Giselle Burillo, the people he defeated in the primary on Sunday May 12,
At the same time, Arias said that he will continue attending official events, something which has been criticized by the opposition.
Juan Carlos Varela believes the campaign will be a two way fight between the Panamenistas and the PRD, and he is unlikely to fall into the trap laid for him by Martinelli before the last election, where they reached an agreement to form an alliance and whoever ran for president would support the candidacy of the other in 2014.
The alliance collapsed and many Panamenista deputies accepted inducements to jump ship. If Varela were to win, they would be looking for a home.
In the wings are potential spoilers, a newly formed party, backed by unions, and a potential independent, a former Electoral Tribunal judge.
Lots of sniping ahead, and the arrows will change direction if the polls show a front runner emerging.