Electoral Court  ruling clears the way  for Martinelli’s bid to return to power

The ruling of the Electoral Court (TE) of March 22, which safeguards the criminal electoral jurisdiction of Ricardo Martinelli, would not only mean that the former President) would arrive unscathed from the action of justice to the general elections of 2024, but would show signs of where the balance would tip in the fight for control of the Democratic Change (CD) party says political analyst Edwin Cabrera in La Prensa.

He recalls that Martinelli wants to recover Democratic Change (CD), the party he created in 1998 because he is convinced that voters associate him with that group, rather than with Realizing Goals (RM), his new party, founded on March 24, 2021.

RM and CD add up, together, 441,661 adherents, according to figures from the TE.

Martinelli embarked on this political project after, in January 2018, his former foreign minister Rómulo Roux took control of CD from him with the support of 63.3% of the convention votes, while he was detained in Miami, awaiting extradition to face trial in the wiretapping case. Martinelli had been out of Panama since 2015.

“Having the CD ballot under his power is too important for him,” says Cabrera. Until now, he recalls, the legal dispute over control of CD has been won by Roux against the claims of deputy Yanibel Ábrego, who distanced herself from Roux and now publicly shows her sympathy for “the boss”, as his followers call him.

If to this is added,  the atomization of the opposition, one has a very favorable political map. for the former president, despite all the local and international corruption scandals in which his name comes to light.

The decision of magistrates Heriberto Araúz and Alfredo Juncá to maintain Martinelli’s electoral jurisdiction in the cases of New Business and Odebrecht is supposed to be for the duration of the RM process for the election of the secretaries of youth and women, scheduled for next April 24. But as the former TE magistrate, Guillermo Márquez Amado, explains, since Martinelli left power in 2014, he has organized a chain of electoral processes, “in order to shelter himself with the electoral jurisdiction.” He did it with CD (until Roux arrived) and now he does it with RM.

In fact, that has already happened in the current electoral process of RM, which served Martinelli to invoke the controversial jurisdiction, although he is not even a candidate nor is he competing for anything at the moment. The election date was set two months after Judge Baloisa Marquínez announced that the hearing in the New Business case, in which he is accused, would be held between January 27 and 31.

“He already did and will continue to do so. He will play with the country, he will play with the institutions. There will be as many choices as you can imagine: secretary of the professionals, workers, etc., in order to keep that jurisdiction in force,” says Márquez Amado.

Araúz and Juncá went too far
Lawyer Carlos Herrera Morán points out that it is clear that Araúz and Juncá overstepped their duties, “because this is a matter for the criminal courts or the Criminal Chamber of the Court.”

“In that sense, the decision of the TE has no significance in the criminal jurisdiction, but what is related to the criminal electoral jurisdiction does affect it, because this mechanism could be prolonged, protecting the accused.”

The political scientist Carlos Guevara Mann concludes that this case “has unmasked the Electoral Court as an accomplice of irregularities and theft”, which shows that “the electoral system urgently needs a change”.