Back

Weekly Report - 26 March 2015 (WR-15-12)

MEXICO: Grim electoral prospects for PRD

There are growing signs that elections in the majority of Mexican states just over two months from now will redefine the country’s political Left. The gubernatorial, state, municipal and federal lower chamber elections on 7 June are a serious test for the Partido de la Revolución Democrática (PRD) and even likely to dictate whether Mexico’s main left-wing party survives in its present form.

The PRD, unsurprisingly, lost politicians as soon as the party’s twice former presidential candidate Andrés Manuel López Obrador left and, in 2014, registered his own party, Movimiento Regeneración Nacional (Morena). But it has also haemorrhaged support in the wake of the complicity of the PRD’s mayor of Iguala, José Luis Abarca, in the ‘disappearance’ of 43 trainee teachers last September. Several prominent PRD politicians, starting with the party’s founder, Cuauhtémoc Cárdenas, savaged the party leadership’s handling of the incident and its political strategy of cooperation with the federal government of President Enrique Peña Nieto, of the Partido Revolucionario Institucional (PRI).

PRD Senator Alejandro Encinas followed Cárdenas’s lead in January, and then Marcelo Ebrard, the former PRD mayor of Mexico City (2006-2012) once seen as a future presidential candidate for the party, quit for the Movimiento Ciudadano (MC) on 27 February. Ebrard repeated the criticism levelled at the party leadership by the rest of the defectors; that the PRD has become a party close to the federal government and far from the people. Campaigning with the MC gubernatorial candidate for San Luis Potosí, Eugenio Govea Arcos, on 21 March, Ebrard said that the PRD would reap the consequences of this mistaken policy at the polls.

The president of the PRD, Carlos Navarrete, swiftly responded that it was sad that Ebrard had chosen to abandon the party just because he failed to win a nomination for a seat in the federal lower chamber of congress (he will top the MC list in this regard). Navarrete sought to downplay the significance of Ebrard’s departure, announcing the creation of “a yellow army” to do door-to-door canvassing all over the country, and insisting that ideas and not personalities would prove decisive.

Ebrard, meanwhile, maintained that it was the controlling faction in the PRD, Nueva Izquierda (NI), dubbed ‘Los Chuchos’, to which Navarrete belongs, that is self-serving. He said that NI put its own members at the top of lists of nominations and lacked ideas that resonated with the Mexican public, instead pursuing a political direction that is “incompatible with the objectives and political duties of the Mexican Left”.

Since February the PRD has also lost three of its 101 deputies in the 500-seat federal lower chamber. Just last week Deputy Martha Lucía Micher Camarena left the party she had belonged to for 20 years to become an independent, explaining in a letter to Navarrete that the PRD had lost credibility over Iguala and criticising the fact that big issues and decisions were simply not debated within the party but dictated by Los Chuchos.

And then, this week the PRD confirmed that it would not present joint candidates this June with the Partido del Trabajo (PT) in 40 electoral districts in the Estado de México. The PT has been a stalwart ally of the PRD but the smaller party struck a deal with the right-wing Partido Acción Nacional (PAN) in the Estado.

The PRD leadership did manage to reach a coalition accord with the PT and the Partido Nueva Alianza (Panal) for 100 elected positions in the Distrito Federal (DF) in the 16 delegaciones (boroughs) and candidates for local deputies. But the PRD’s decision to go into an alliance with Panal, a party controlled by the imprisoned teachers’ union leader Elba Esther Gordillo it has long reviled, smacks of opportunism and could encourage more defections, while alienating more left-wing voters.

The decision to embrace Panal also shows the risk the PRD leadership is prepared to take in a desperate effort not to concede any ground in the DF to Morena. The elections will show just how much ground the PRD has lost on the Left to Morena – and the better Morena does, particularly in the DF, the PRD’s bastion, the more likely other PRD politicians might decide to defect.

Morena enjoys 11% support in the race for federal lower chamber seats, according to an opinion poll published by Parametría this week. This is up seven percentage points on last November, and positions Morena as the fourth largest party in Mexico, surpassing the Partido Verde Ecologista de México (PVEM), on 10%, for the first time. It also puts Morena just one point behind the PRD, on 12%, below its previous nadir of 13% last February. Morena also has support in some areas, such as the DF, of more than 20%.

Meanwhile, the PRI fell two points on the previous survey last month to 30%, while the PAN climbed one point to 27%, suggesting that smaller parties could benefit at the expense of all of the country’s larger parties amid widespread voter disenchantment.

End of preview - This article contains approximately 905 words.

Subscribers: Log in now to read the full article

Not a Subscriber?

Choose from one of the following options

LatinNews
Intelligence Research Ltd.
167-169 Great Portland Street,
5th floor,
London, W1W 5PF - UK
Phone : +44 (0) 203 695 2790
Contact
You may contact us via our online contact form
Copyright © 2022 Intelligence Research Ltd. All rights reserved.