NewsLatin AmericaThe Mexican opposition deflates in three acts

The Mexican opposition deflates in three acts

The opposition is fraying. The start of the year has shown how immature are the leaders of the partisan options that call themselves opponents of President Lopez Obrador. In three acts, as if it were a farcical play, this unraveling of those who seek to challenge an overwhelming government can be illustrated.

First act. He PRIAN He takes everything… and even those at home he disdains.

National Action and the Institutional Revolutionary have decided that the future is cupular. They announced that their compact and refractory leaders will decide the distribution of candidacies. As the great electoral battle approaches, they show that dialogue with outsiders, including the PRD, is fine, but without committing beforehand to give in.

And if I saw you, I don’t remember, Cortes and Alito seem to say to the groups of citizens who insist on proposing that a great opposition coalition be formed. If in 2021 the benefit was mutual, the leaders reiterate with their facts, now wait for me a little bit because in 2024 I’ll play my job and first the bone, and then the democratic commitment.

Those are the garments that the leaders of the two most important opposition parties display to the outside: strafing decisions, first us and then —perhaps— you. The crucial choice to renew the Presidency of the Republic and Congress falls on whoever behaves like a dealer who wants the aces for himself.

And inside their organizations things are not looking better. The most emblematic case is taken by the PRI, which the week ending gave a spectacle of institutional insolvency worthy of a high school porril grid (with forgiveness to those who do politics in high schools for comparing them to Alito and Senator Miguel Angel Osorio Chong).

Both PRI leaders deepened the anger that they have had since the end of the Pena Nieto presidency. As seen, they cannot be together in the same room and thus they want to convince that they are up to the electoral challenge where the opposition will promote itself, against AMLO, as a guarantor of tolerance, maturity and plurality.

The show put on by the former Secretary of the Interior and his ex-pupil renews fears that the PRI is not ready, and will not be ready in 2024, to move to a stage where it can be counted among the parties with a real democratic commitment. These media riots show the true (lack of) height of the PRI leadership and its cadres.

In the PAN the fight is more deaf but no less serious. the national leadership whiteblue he prepares himself to defoliate the daisy of how the method of selection of the presidential candidate has to be decided. Marko Cortes ignores even those at home because he believes that he has everything at hand to, in the worst case scenario, guarantee his loyal new jobs in 2024.

If Cortes wanted to make a competitive presidential candidacy viable, he would know that more than an agreement with the PRI members, he must ally with the citizens who made him the second political force in 2021. Marko knows, however, that sitting down with the citizens puts the only thing at risk. that sustains him: the positions to be distributed among his nomenclature.

Second act. Dante’s loneliness.

The most conspicuous disaster was on Monday. The presentation of “Punto de partida”, a diagnosis to activate a discussion about the direction of Mexico, became a media mess not because of the document in question, but because of Cuauhtemoc Cardenas’ disavowal of the group that invoked the name of the engineer when launching this initiative.

The alleged co-authorship of Cardenas in the diagnosis that points to serious deficiencies in the regime provoked anger in the National Palace, where the president attacked the founder of the PRD and former presidential candidate. Dante saw how the document, with too many orange fingerprints, ended up being the least of it: the note was the demarcation of Cuauhtemoc.

In addition to that, some polls showed that the strength of Delgado’s candidates in the State of Mexico and Coahuila is not enough to contest those governorships. How can you call for a transversal alliance and at the same time cling to not negotiating common candidacies when you don’t even have a chance of achieving good results?

Speaking of polls, there was another one that was also bad news for Delgado. In Jalisco, the enclave where MC has the greatest strength (government, control of Congress and the most important mayors), a survey of Mural It showed that this party wins with any orange candidate, and not only with the mayor Pablo Lemus, Dante’s dolphin.

And in Nuevo Leon, in the midst of local clashes, Governor Samuel Garcia receives treatment and dispensations from the Secretary of the Interior. It is true that AMLO also wants to take away a million-dollar investment from Tesla, but like Enrique Alfaro in Jalisco, the MC characters with whom the Federation negotiates are the governors, not the party leadership.

Dante will lose months in pushing the “Starting Point”, which intends to give results in June, the month in which the Edomex and Coahuila elections will be resolved -and hardly in his favor-, and when it is more than likely that the decantation of Morena for his corcholata is also happening. Dante seems determined not to go alone, but to stay that way.

Third act. Citizens or politicians?

When it was announced that the colectivos that launched the successful march on November 13, 2022 would now occupy the Zocalo on the last Sunday in February, several analysts cited the classic risk that sequels are almost never good, especially if they don’t prove themselves. that the call is really massive on the plate where AMLO reigns.

Beyond the risk that the second concentration, with its dozens of aftershocks in cities of the Republic, will fail, there is another equally complex challenge. To the organized citizenship that assumes itself as opposition to the lopezobradorismo The grace period that allowed him to continue without defining a clear course of action will expire on that date of February 26.

Now what has come to an end for the citizens who promote the vote against the president and his candidates. If before they were seen as part of the opposition alliance, as facilitators behind the scenes of negotiations and agreements, as guarantors even of unpresentable leadership, now they will have to show that they have their own defined path.

Because in the scenario that this meeting is successful —and the president does everything to help them with verbal attacks and with his onslaught to appoint, without any negotiation, by uncontested majority the four INE advisers—, then they must demonstrate that in addition to mobilizing , you already know how to take advantage of this step by step momentum.

The dilemma of these groups is complex: a successful march will result in the PRIAN want to take advantage of them but without allowing them more in the distribution of candidacies. That the citizens deposit their support and votes in an uneven negotiation, where the parties look down on civil society. As usual.

Before 2021, those citizen groups knew that the PRIAN It was the only alternative for Morena not to repeat absolute legislative majorities. The election proved them right. But after the whims and betrayals of Marko and Alito, and as 2024 approaches, it is time for them to ask themselves if it is better to give up their capital in an alliance without controls, or go it alone.

The alternative is to double down on the partidocracia and impose on them a platform and method of selecting candidates. It is not impossible, but the PRI and the PAN do not see the democrats who can take that giant step, where everything they eventually earn will not be for the enjoyment of their bureaucracies.

To finish off these three acts of opposition with questionable or diffuse leadership, a few words about Cuauhtemoc Cardenas, leader without movement.

The voice of the Michoacan is so coveted that, precisely, it caused the farce between Dante Delgado, his relatives and the members of the so-called Collective for Mexico, and the President of the Republic.

The demarcation of the engineer Cardenas from Colectivo por Mexico was late given that weeks ago he missed the opportunity, before the official event, to clarify —when his name was put forward several times in the press among the authors of Punto de partida— that he no longer I was in that group.

Paradoxically, the affaire demonstrated the weight that Cardenas still has. Andres Manuel’s attack and the defense that not a few came out to make of the engineer recalled the dimension of his democratic struggle of more than 35 years. And a disqualification of that voice is feared by Lopez Obrador. That is why others try to cling to that authority.

Cuauhtemoc will await his new moment, which is good news that nevertheless reveals how many other leaders are missing these days when the opposition is deflating.

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