What happened
Roberto Madrazo, the president of the Partido Revolucionario Institucional, came out of the party's XIX assembly a bit stronger than when the assembly started. The big question is whether his success in avoiding decisive and divisive actions will mean that he will remain in charge. Madrazo has already been outmanoeuvred in the Estado and his rivals are furious about what has happened in Nayarit. Bad results for Madrazo in both these places could still prevent him from winning the PRI presidential nomination for 2006.
Madrazo's support has been sliding inside the party: in August last year 54% of priístas said in polls that they would support him. Since then his support has slipped: in December it was 42% and in February, after the loss of Guerrero on 6 February, it was down to 39%.
The XIX assembly did not get off to the smoothest of starts. Hundreds of delegates to the special assembly of the Partido Revolucionario Institucional walked out on the evening of 3 March, the day before the assembly closed. Those walking out were loyal to the Tucom (Todos Unidos Contra Madrazo) who are unhappy with the PRI's leader, Roberto Madrazo.
The walk-out shows how tense the party has become as it senses that it has a good chance of regaining the presidency in 2006. The Tucom (which prefers to be known as the Unidad Democrática group) is determined that Madrazo should not become the party's presidential candidate by default.
A prominent member of the Tucom, Natividad González Paras, the governor of Nuevo León, put the issue starkly in an interview with La Jornada, a Mexico City newspaper. He said that if Madrazo won the PRI nomination in a fair fight, the party would rally around him. If, however, the fight was not fair, the party would split and Madrazo would have little chance of winning the presidency.
The reason why the delegates from four states (the Estado, Nuevo León, Sonora and some from the Distrito Federal) walked out was that they suspected that the counting of the votes to reform various of the party's statutes was being fiddled. They were particularly annoyed about a vote on Article 79 of the party's constitution which sets out the powers and membership of the national standing committee.
This committee is likely to be the one which steers the party through its presidential primary, given that Madrazo will, almost certainly, have to resign as party president to run for the presidential nomination. Madrazo does not want his number two, the party's secretary-general, Elba Esther Gordillo, to take over. She has allowed the union she runs, the Sindicato Nacional de Trabajadores de la Educación, to set up a new political party. Gordillo is so out of sympathy with the current PRI hierarchy that she did not bother to go to the party's XIX national assembly in Puebla, which culminated on 4 March, the PRI's 76th birthday.
Significantly, this issue of who should take over from Madrazo was too hot for the assembly to handle. Madrazo withdrew reform of Article 164 of the PRI constitution from discussion. This article stipulates that when the party president resigns, the secretary-general should take over. Madrazo said that the issue will now be settled by the party's national policy committee. Madracistas dominate this body.
David Penchyna, the chairman of the statutes commission at the assembly and a prominent Madracista, admitted that the debate about the reforms of the party's statutes had been heated and that the votes had been so close that some had to be taken three times. He denied that there had been any chicanery. Penchyna holds the pivotal role of secretary of the national policy committee, so he can ensure that the Madracistas get their way there.
The assembly drew 6,400 delegates. The Madracistas tried to portray the walkout as a premeditated stunt. This is unlikely because not all the Tucom delegations walked out: the delegates from Tamaulipas and Hidalgo both remained. What is clear is that Madrazo does not have the support of all of the party, perhaps not even a majority.
Issues: Senior priístas, not necessarily fully paid up Tucomistas, are calling for Madrazo to resign his party position in early July if he wants to run for the party's presidential nomination. Fidel Herrera, the newly installed governor of Veracruz, came up with a workable solution: he suggested on 2 March that Madrazo should resign as party leader after the most important elections this year, for the Estado de México on 3 July.
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President accuses mayor of Mexico
City of lying
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President Vicente Fox's spokesman, Rubén Aguilar, read a statement on 3 March in which he accused the mayor of Mexico City, Andrés Manuel López Obrador, of being "inexact and untruthful" about the implications if he lost his immunity from prosecution. López Obrador, who heads the polls for the presidential elections in 2006, has always claimed that if he lost his immunity (for contempt of court in pushing through a compulsory purchase order), he would be unable to run in the presidential elections. Fox claims that this is untrue. The statement said that the loss of immunity would not prevent López Obrador from running and that the presidency has never been and would never be a block to López Obrador's presidential ambitions. Accordingly, the statement said that provided López Obrador obeyed the law and was chosen by his party, he could run. The statement continued by saying that the president could not interfere with the process in any way. López Obrador alleges that the president wants to prevent him from running next year. On 27 February López Obrador sent a letter to the attorney-general asking for him to drop the proceedings to strip him of his immunity on the grounds that ignoring a court order is not a crime in Mexico. Jurists are divided over whether the government, in the form of the attorney-general, could intervene in the case. Some say that as he is bringing the case, he could drop it. Others argue that once the process has started it cannot be stopped. It seems unlikely that the four congressmen charged with deciding whether López Obrador should lose his immunity from prosecution will make a recommendation to congress before Easter. The current session of congress concludes at the end of April. The four did announce, at the end of February that they would provide a recommendation to congress. The idea had been floated that they would fail to make a recommendation, thus halting the whole process. The key people on the four-person committee are the two priístas, Rebeca Godínez and Francisco Cuauhtémoc Frías. The presumption among commentators is that their votes are not committed. This makes a contrast with the other two members, Alvaro Elías Loredo from the Partido Acción Nacional, and Horacio Duarte, the chairman of the committee, who comes from López Obrador's Partido de la Revolución Democrática. Commentators assume that Elías Loredo is ready to vote to strip López Obrador of his immunity, while Duarte will vote to keep the mayor safe from prosecution. |