You can feel the competition in the air, posters everywhere, people fighting for their preference, it must be election time. Elections in Panama are less than a month away, the 2nd of May millions of Panamanians, or to be more exact 1,869,983 persons who are registered to vote, will go to the urns to cast their wish for who they want as their next president.

     In the past year or so I have seen dozen of polls in the media. These polls reflect the interviewer’s opinion, but the people interviewed were usually older. For older people, politics is a normal issue, everybody has an opinion and they express it frequently, so I began thinking about what people my age have to say about politics, thus I conducted a small poll (20 persons) at Florida State University-Panama.

     The results of my poll were clearly not what I expected. I asked the students if they belonged to any political party, 100% told me they did not. Then I asked them if they would ever consider joining one, 14 said no (70%) and 6 said yes (30%). I also asked students for their age, and asked them if they were going to vote. If they said they were going to vote then they had to answer for whom, and if they said they were not going to vote I asked them why not. These are the results of students:


     As you can see there was an immense lack of enthusiasm towards voting, 30 % said they were simply not going to vote, and of the 70% who said they were going to vote, 29% was uncertain for which candidate. I hear people complaining daily about politicians, but if you simply give up and don’t go to vote you are promoting for more bad candidates to take position. I know people think that one vote less or one vote more doesn’t make a difference, but it does. We are the future, and for a better future I encourage you to make a difference May 2, and vote!


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