Televised Debates

The U.S. presidential election is a little more than a month away; the election will be November 6. President Barack Obama and the Republican candidate, Mitt Romney, have faced each other in the first televised debate out of the scheduled three. It is a sound democratic exercise since it permits a contrast of programs and the opportunity for each candidate to punish the weaker sides of his adversary, as has happened in more than one occasion since the first televised debate which took place between Kennedy and Nixon in 1960.

Different democracies have continued to incorporate this new situation, almost as a rule, to the point where the person who has refused it has been placed in a bad position before public opinion. In Spain, we had to wait until 1993 for there to be a televised debate — the candidates were Felipe González and José María Aznar — and even today there have only been five of them. In Catalonia, not even that: Pujol, Maragall and Montilla have systematically denied participating in any two-person debate on television, and only accepted in 2003 then-candidate Mas Maragall’s taking the stage in a debate for which La Vanguardia had exclusive media coverage.

In this election, obviously, the debate is going to repeat itself; that is why one should appreciate that the First Secretary of the Socialist Party of Catalonia opened debate proposing an innovative formula given the peculiar multiparty in Catalonia, in which the weight of the second party is not in Spain. Navarro has proposed a three-way debate between Convergence and Union, the Socialist Party of Catalonia and the People’s Party, and has even chosen the channel: 8tv. The offer has been accepted by the President of the People’s Party, Alicia Sánchez-Camacho. Let’s hope that in the next couple of days the organizers of the campaign for Convergence and Union and Mas will also accept.