By Michael Soltys, Senior Editor of Buenos Aires Herald.

This election campaign should never be about the validity of the candidates but about the coherence of policies which continue to be conspicuous by their absence. To make matters worse, the artificially central question of “testimonial candidacies” (i.e. big names seeking to pull more votes without any intention of sitting in Congress) is not so much a legal as an ethical problem. If the basic principle of justice assumes any defendant to be innocent until proven guilty, then surely any politician who accepts a congressional candidacy has to be assumed to be in good faith until proven otherwise — such was the tenor of the National Electoral Court’s ruling on Monday.

Yet even in legal rather than ethical terms, the court could have thought through its ruling a little further. After all, if politicians have to be assumed to be in good faith when running for a Congress seat until proven otherwise, then surely they must be assumed to be in good faith when swearing into office for a full term (absolutely basic for political stability), like Buenos Aires Governor Daniel Scioli — and that good faith is broken by a sincere parliamentary candidacy. It is thus not good enough to say that any member of the executive branch has the right to aspire to a place in the legislative branch as long as they do not seek to serve in both at the same time — the incompatibility runs much deeper. And apart from incompatibility, there is also the question of inconsistency — for example, if ex-president Néstor Kirchner has spent his entire political career until this year preening himself as a “penguin” from Patagonia, then how can we still believe in his good faith when he now insists on thrusting himself forward as the voice of Greater Buenos Aires?

While the law must be impartial, is it obliged to be totally abstract? Corporate law is surely formulated with reference to business life — why should the law not heed political realities? And one of these realities is that Argentine politics lacks any tradition or mechanism of self-correction — in this sense the courts could have a role in imposing political ethics. But why have we allowed the courts to occupy this central role in the campaign — should not the voter be the judge and jury in an election? If the United States electorate voted in its time to stamp down on Watergate and turn a blind eye to Irangate, are not political ethics in a democracy ultimately the decision of the voting citizenry?