Mexico & Nafta - December 2008 (ISSN 1741-444X)

The astute leader of the Partido Revolucionario Institucional (PRI), Beatriz Paredes Rangel, has offered leftwing Partido de la Revolución Democrática (PRD) an alliance for the mid-term congressional elections in 2009.

The offer is likely to split the PRD further. The party is already braced for the radicals, led by Andrés Manuel López Obrador, to flounce out of the party after their candidate for the party presidency, Alejandro Encinas, was ruled by the national electoral authorities to have lost in the internal PRD election in March.

Paredes made the offer to the PRD at the Socialist International council meeting in Puerto Vallarta on 17 November. Paredes argued that together the PRD and the PRI could reshape the country. Both the PRI and the PRD are members of the Socialist International, which brings together leftwing parties from across the world.

What Paredes is proposing, in essence, is a return to the political situation before 1988 when Cuauhtémoc Cárdenas, the son of Mexico's greatest 20th century president, Lázaro, split from the PRI when he was denied the party's presidential nomination. Cárdenas's split from the PRI, arguably, divided the Left in Mexico and allowed the rightwing Partido Acción Nacional (PAN) to win the presidency in 2000 and again in 2006.

More importantly, a PRI-PRD alliance would mean that the minor parties in Mexico (the Partido Verde Ecologista; Convergencia; the Partido del Trabajo; and the Partido Alianza Nueva, which is dominated by Elba Esther Gordillo, the leader of the teachers' union) would become irrelevancies. Now, they are important in elections and in congress because no single party, or alliance, commands a majority.

It is worth noting that most of the smaller parties are virtually one person bands. Patricia Mercado, the one time leader and presidential candidate for the Partido Alternativo Social Demócrata y Campesino, has split with that party and is now heading a new party, Movimiento Alternativa. She is one of Mexico's most prominent feminists and is a leading campaigner for abortion rights. When she ran for the presidency of Mexico in 2006, her strong performance (2.7% support nationally) tipped the election away from López Obrador and secured national registration and public funding for her party. Mercado said that her new party will not participate in the forthcoming congressional elections next year. Meanwhile, Mercado's former party, now the Partido Socialdemócrata (PSD) is making overtures to Encinas.

Following Cárdenas's defection from the PRI, the PRI's candidates in the 1988 and 1994 presidential elections were both technocrats (Carlos Salinas and Ernesto Zedillo, respectively). When the PRI reverted to picking a populist politician, its traditional choice for the presidency, Francisco Labastida was defeated in 2000. His defeat, arguably, owed more to the mistakes made by the technocrats than anything else.

Cárdenas himself probably won the 1988 election, but refused to contest the result in the streets. He ran again as the PRD's presidential candidate in 1994 and 2000 but was replaced by López Obrador in 2006. López Obrador claims that he won the 2006 election, though the official result gave Felipe Calderón Hinojosa a narrow victory by 0.56% of the votes cast. Despite the closeness of the vote there was no full recount and the electoral authorities have only been stopped from burning the ballot papers by a series of injunctions taken out by Proceso, a leftwing news magazine. The 1988 ballot papers were burnt in 1991.

The tensions inside the PRD were obvious at Puerto Vallarta. Cárdenas, now a vice-president of the IS, said that he would walk out of the meeting if Porfirio Muñoz Ledo was invited to speak on the PRD's behalf. Muñoz Ledo had been one of the PRD's founders, along with Cárdenas, but is now aligned with López Obrador and his Frente Amplio Progresista faction.

The newly-elected president of the PRD, Jesús Ortega, gave a cautious welcome to Paredes' offer. He said that the party would discuss the issues that Mexico faced with Paredes, but doubted that it would go into a formal alliance for the mid-term congressional elections in 2009.

The problem for Ortega and the PRD is that it needs the PRI more than the PRI needs it. The PRD's own polling shows that its support is collapsing. In the past three years it has lost 42% of its voters and its own polls suggest that it would now win only between 11% and 13% of the national vote (less than Cárdenas won in 2000) if there was an election tomorrow. In 2006, López Obrador won 35.3% of the vote running in an alliance with two other parties, Convergencia and the Partido del Trabajo.

The PRD pollsters found that voters were put off by the party's squabbling after the disputed election in March and the antics of López Obrador's supporters in congress, who have tried on several occasions to interrupt congressional sessions which were likely to approve business which López Obrador opposed. 

Ortega heads the Nueva Izquierda wing of the PRD. He did offer Encinas the number two position in the party in an effort to prevent a split, but Encinas turned the offer down. The position, secretary generalship, has instead gone to Hortensia Aragón, who is close to Amalia Garcí­a, a former PRD party president and now governor of Zacatecas. Garcí­a's wing of the PRD is the Foro Nuevo Sol. Encinas's faction is Izquierda Unida.

The problem for Ortega is that the PRD in Mexico City is loyal to Encinas and López Obrador. Alejandra Barrales, the leader of the PRD in Mexico City, has already launched a movement against Ortega. Her movement is the Movimiento Nacional por el Rescate del PRD. This group rejects the principle that a national electoral tribunal, the Tribunal Electoral del Poder Judicial de la Federación, should settle who won the election for the party's presidency in March.

Although the PRD is fractious, it is dominant in Mexico City which is a key electoral battleground. In the 2006 congressional elections the PRD won 25 of the 27 congressional seats in the Distrito Federal; the PAN won the other two. There are 300 directly elected seats in the 500-seat congress.

The PRI is especially keen on negotiating a deal with the PRD over Jalisco: the state is one of the PAN's fiefs. The PAN won 18 of the 19 congressional seats in Jalisco in the 2006 congressional elections and has held the state governorship since 1995.

An alliance between the PRI and the PRD would be bad news for the PAN which in 2007 lost Yucatán, its only bastion south of Mexico City. Despite the PRI's defeats in the 2000 election (and its embarrassing third place in 2006), the party has remained hugely powerful in rural Mexico and in the east of the country. The PRI still runs 18 of Mexico's 31 states and 19 of the state capitals. The PAN runs eight states and the PRD four, plus Mexico City, which is technically a federal district, not a state.

Although the PRD retained control of Michoacán (the Cárdenas family's home state) in 2007, the PRI has won all but one of the other important elections since Calderón was elected. The PRI's only significant defeat was in Baja California in 2007, where its controversial candidate, Jorge Hank Rhon, was easily defeated by the PAN candidate, José Guadalupe Osuna Millán.

PRD: On 12 November the country's top electoral court ruled that a moderate, Jesús Ortega, had won the March election to head the country's main leftwing party, the Partido de la Revolución Democrática (PRD). The decision was a blow to the radical faction of the PRD, which is headed by Andrés Manuel López Obrador. This faction prefers direct protests (it tried, unsuccessfully, to stop congress considering the final element of the 2009 budget on 12 November by seizing the rostrum) over the more moderate majority of the PRD.

The moderates argue that the electorate is divided between the three main parties (the other two are the Partido Revolucionario Institucional and the ruling Partido Acción Nacional), and so the PRD has a duty to negotiate rather than, as the radicals prefer, simply oppose.

The unanimous decision by the Tribunal Electoral del Poder Judicial de la Federación (TEPJF) looks final, though the radicals do not like it. The radicals' candidate for the PRD presidency, Alejandro Encinas, criticised the decision on the bizarre grounds that national bodies had no role to play in resolving internal party elections. This argument is clearly anti-democratic, and will be seized on by López Obrador's many critics. Encinas's subsidiary point, that the TEPJF found that the election, on 16 March, was unsatisfactory, is much stronger. The TEPJF found that votes from over a fifth of the PRD's polling stations had not been properly counted. Encinas called on Ortega to reject the TEPJF's decision, but there is little chance of this happening.

• Opinion polls

The latest opinion polls show the PRI ahead in the congressional elections. A poll by Buendí­a & Laredo for a Mexico City newspaper, El Universal, found that the PRI was on 41%. The surprise is that the ruling Partido Acción Nacional (PAN) is only five percentage points behind on 36%. The Partido de la Revolución Democrática (PRD) is running third with 19%.The poll has a 3.5% margin of error.

In 2009 Mexico holds midterm elections to pick a new chamber of deputies and there are six gubernatorial elections and eight other state elections to elect state congresses and mayors. In 2008 the PRI won the state elections in Quintana Roo, Guerrero, Hidalgo, Coahuila and Nayarit.The next presidential elections are due in 2012. Beatriz Paredes, the president of the PRI who has presided over a recovery in the party's fortunes, must be a candidate for the nomination, though the favourite is Manlio Fabio Beltrones, a former governor of Sonora and currently the PRI's leader in the senate.

What is interesting about the Buendí­a opinion poll is that 55% of the respondents say that they would consider voting for the PRI. The PRI ruled Mexico from the Revolution, which ended in 1930, until 2000. The corresponding   figures for possible voters for the PAN and the PRD are 53% and 33%. The figures for people who would never vote for a particular party are: 55% for the PRD; 35% of the PAN and 33% for the PRI.

• PRD fine reduced

The Instituto Federal Electoral reduced the fine it imposed on the PRD for its post-election protests in 2006 by 50%. The fine is now M$39.5m.

• What election?

The only cloud in recent opinion polls by Buendí­a & Laredo for a Mexico City newspaper, El Universal, is that a mere 45% of those polled realised that there were mid-term elections next year.