In a context of growing discredit of institutions and normalization of corruption, an opinion piece reignites the debate on the foundations of Paraguayan democracy. The provocation stems from a statement heard from a journalist: that Niccolò Machiavelli was right and that his thought would be even more pertinent in present-day Paraguay.
The text questions this view, recalling that, before the Florentine, political reflection had already existed for over two thousand years, with Aristotle. Machiavelli, by denying morality as a political guide and reducing the human being to a passionate and selfish being, would have “cut off the arm” of institutions. Without them, politics drifts toward authoritarianism.
The central dilemma is: what makes a democracy? Rulers, people, or institutions and procedures? The article argues that institutions — from the Latin instituere, “to keep standing” — are what remain beyond momentary passions. But they are not enough alone: they need citizens who inhabit them with ethics.
To this end, the author distinguishes “individual” from “person.” The individual, atomized and selfish, is what Machiavelli had in mind. The person, on the contrary, is seen in their dignity and openness to others, a tradition that goes back to Aristotle, Thomas Aquinas, Jacques Maritain, and Emmanuel Mounier, and was taken up by Paraguayan philosophers such as Adriano Irala Burgos and Secundino Núñez. Both insisted that without ethical formation there is no citizenship.
The conclusion is that a republic without educated citizens is an empty shell, a sick democracy. The signs are visible: falsified degrees, nepotism, normalized corruption. All of this comes from the individual who never became a person, who learned to hold office without believing in institutions, using the public thing as their own — mbó’i pire, easy prey for the poguasu.