LOVE AND POLITICS

By Raoul Suarez

He fell in love the way ordinary voters fall for campaign promises. Naively. Desperately. Against all reason. She was the daughter of an incumbent politician, the jewel of a dynasty whose family crest might as well have been embossed on the town’s coffers.

Her beauty was luminous. Her laughter was rehearsed. Her affection was distributed with the same precision as government relief goods; frequent during election season, nonexistent afterwards.

He was not naive about politics, only about love. He took pride in his feelings. Noble. Dignified. Unsullied by calculation. He was ignorant to the fact that the heart is the original patronage system. Once you have given it away, you usually expect something in return. His campaign slogan was devotion. His rallies were daydreams. Every smile she tossed in his direction he mistook for a landslide victory.

She, of course, saw him as just another constituent. A handshake. A polite nod. Nothing binding. He was a footnote in her speeches, the kind of background presence politicians and heiresses are trained to ignore but to him she was special. She was the revolution. The overthrow of loneliness. The promise of a brighter tomorrow.

The cruelest truth, however, was that she was already aligned with another party. Not a political one, though her family had enough allies to keep city hall in perpetual captivity, but a suitor of equally entrenched lineage. Their love was not the product of passion but of mergers and acquisitions. It was dynasty preserving dynasty, like corporations swapping board seats.

Watching them together, he realized love stories in politics always end the same way; not with fireworks, but with contracts signed in dark rooms. What he offered was sincerity. What she needed was strategy. He was the protest placard waving outside the gates, she the VIP banquet inside of it.

Yet he kept campaigning in his own foolish way. He lingered at her speeches, half listening to her platitudes about service to the people, while imagining those words whispered to him in secret. He scribbled letters he never sent, ballots of longing he cast into the void. He convinced himself she might someday defect, cross the aisle of her heart, and recognize him as more than a voter.

But the ballot box of love is not tamper-proof. He discovered that when he stumbled upon photographs of her hand entwined with her groom’s at a lavish engagement party. Of course, it was sponsored by contractors who had been overpaid for underbuilt bridges. The smile on her face was as dazzling as campaign billboards, the same smile she gave everyone, the same smile he once thought meant something special.

That night, he drank like a defeated candidate and cursed like an obese and closeted senator in a corruption hearing. The truth seared him. Love and ill-gotten wealth share a truth. Losing what was never yours hurts the most.

It was an election he was never qualified to run in, let alone win. Her heart was gerrymandered long before he filed his candidacy. The dynasty of her affection had already secured the machinery. He was the independent candidate of passion, drowned out by the machinery of convenience.

In time, his heartbreak took on the flavor of politics itself. Bitter. Cyclical. Laced with cynicism. He stopped believing in fairy tales. He stopped believing in platforms. When he heard campaign promises, he heard love letters. When he saw ribbon cuttings, he thought of weddings. Both were ceremonies that excluded him, yet paraded their happiness in public.

Some say unrequited love makes a poet; others say it makes a fool. For him, it made a satirist. He began to write about the romance between corruption and power, a marriage officiated by greed and blessed by apathy. He saw himself in every taxpayer. Paying dues. Never getting services. Loving without being loved in return.

His story was not just a love story, but a cautionary tale about politics. Never expect justice from a system built on injustice. Never expect love from someone whose affections are already mortgaged.

Whether it is in the affairs of the state or in the affairs of the heart, the lesson is the same. What the powerful hoard is not meant for you. When you lose it, the grief feels sharp and unfair, until you remember it was never yours to claim.

He fell in love the way ordinary voters fall for campaign promises. Naively. Desperately. Against all reason. That was the irony he finally embraced. Love is the most democratic of feelings but the least democratic of outcomes. Some are born into privilege, others into longing. She was a dynasty; he was a voter. And in politics as in love, the voter always loses.