Mexico & Nafta - April 2011 (ISSN 1741-444X)

President Felipe Calderón startled the ruling Partido Acción Nacional (PAN) on 5 March by suggesting that the party should choose the best candidate for the presidential elections in 2012, even if that person is not a Panista.

This suggestion immediately triggered a row in the PAN. The party president, Gustavo Madero, rejected the idea straight away. More interestingly, Calderón's predecessor as president, Vicente Fox (2000-2006), endorsed the idea, even though Fox and Calderón have long had difficult personal and political relations.

Calderón's suggestion is an admission that there is no obvious PAN candidate for 2012. His statement is a blow for Ernesto Cordero, the finance minister, who has long been assumed to be Calderón's preferred candidate for the PAN presidential nomination. Some claim that Calderón may have been endorsing Heriberto Félix Guerra, the welfare minister, who technically is not a member of the PAN, though he is a member of the PAN aristocracy, through his wife, Lorena Clouthier. She is the daughter of a hugely popular PAN leader, Manuel Clouthier, who died in a suspicious motor accident on 1 October 1989.

Calderón made his incendiary comments in an address to the PAN's national committee. Besides Fox, the PAN leader in the senate, José González Morfí­n, also endorsed the notion of an independent candidate. González Morfí­n pointed out that the party has frequently backed independents for state governorships and city mayors. Fox also supports the idea of completely independent figures being allowed to run for the presidency. Under current election law, only candidates nominated by registered parties can stand for the presidency.

PRD leadership: The left-wing Partido de la Revolución Democrática (PRD) chose Jesús Zambrano and Dolores Padierna as its president and secretary general for the next three years on 20 March. These two will lead the party into the presidential elections in 2012. It is far from clear that the feuding PRD will be a force in these elections, though it is the country's third biggest party and controls Mexico City (DF). Zambrano and Padierna come from different factions in the party: Padierna is married to René Bejarano, who is close to Andrés Manuel López Obrador, the radical left-wing leader.

In their victory speeches, Zambrano hailed the success of the tactical alliances the PRD had gone into with the Partido Acción Nacional (PAN). In her victory speech, Padierna criticised the alliances and argued that the PRD should be true to its identity and support López Obrador in 2012. 

PRI platform: The main opposition party, the Partido Revolucionario Institucional (PRI) clearly believes that an alliance between the PAN and the PRD poses a major threat to its prospects in 2012. The PRI party president, Humberto Moreira, condemned the much debated prospective alliance between the right-wing PAN and the PRD in the Estado. Before the consulta in the Estado on 27 March, he described the proposal as a “a farce". He said everyone knew the result of such an “unnatural" alliance. He advised voters not to waste their votes on something that would “never work" given the political differences between the two parties and their leaderships. However, he did recognise a potential threat in the proposed alliance, claiming that it was looking to steal a potential candidate from the PRI's ranks: “they haven't won a single election with one of their own members, they only win with former prií­stas as they did in [2010] and Guerrero," he said.       

Coahuila: The other major state election on 3 July 2011 is in Coahuila. Moreira, now the PRI's national party president, had been governor of the state until taking up his new position. One of his brothers, Rubén, is the PRI candidate to succeed him. Even in Coahuila, where the leftwing PRD has little support, Andrés Manuel López Obrador will not go into an alliance with the PAN. He prefers to back to a former federal deputy, Jesús González Schmal, as the candidate for a leftwing alliance headed by the Partido del Trabajo and  Convergencia.  López Obrador also dismissed the PAN's pre-candidate, Guillermo Anaya Llamas, as a member of the “mafia" which runs Mexico. López Obrador accused the outgoing president of the PRD, Jesús Ortega (whose successor Zambrano is from the same wing of the party) of having done a deal with President Felipe Calderón for forge alliances in various states. On 29 March, indeed, the PRD, the PAN, along with the Unidad Democrática de Coahuila, agreed an alliance for 3 July.