Mexico & Nafta - January 2009 (ISSN 1741-444X)

The country's two biggest parties in the lower house of congress, the Partido Acción Nacional (PAN) and the leftwing alliance led by the Partido de la Revolución Democrática (PRD), are feuding as they prepare for mid term elections in July. The PRD's feuds, which revolve around its controversial radical leader, Andrés Manuel López Obrador, have been more public but the PAN's feuds are just as intense.

The PAN is fiercely divided over who should be its candidate for the governorship of Nuevo León and whether the party should go into an alliance with Elba Esther Gordillo, the powerful leader of the teachers union and founder of the Partido Nueva Alianza (PNA), which has a handful of seats in the federal congress, for the election in Nuevo León. The PAN has yet to decide how it will pick its candidate for the Nuevo León governorship.

The PAN is also divided over the result of the primary election to pick its candidate for the governorship of San Luis Potosí­ (SLP). The party hierarchy wants activists to rally around Alejandro Zapata Perogordo, but a faction of the party loyal to a senator, Eugenio Govea, claims that the election, and Zapata's primary win in mid December, was rigged. What infuriated Govea's supporters is that Germán Martí­nez Cázares, the PAN's national president, endorsed Zapata even though the party had yet to declare an official winner of the primary contest.

Querétaro and SLP are probably the PAN's best chances of victory in this year's six gubernatorial elections. The party's big problem, however, will be to do as well as it did in 2006 in the congressional elections. In the last mid term elections, the PAN lost a quarter of its federal deputies. It currently has 206 deputies.

The party has not yet decided, much to activists' disquiet, how it will choose candidates for congress. On 13 January Martí­nez Cázares said that the PAN's national executive had decided that at least half the candidates would be chosen “directly". He implied that this meant by election, but the form of such elections is far from clear. It seems that all the party's candidates for congress's 200 proportionally elected seats will be chosen this way. The other 300 members of congress represent constituencies and are elected through a first-past-the-post system.

The Left is in more public disarray. It still looks likely that the radicals, led by Andrés Manuel López Obrador, will split from the realists, led by Jesús Ortega, the new president of the main leftwing PRD. On 15 December, López Obrador gave notice (through his brother) that he was intending to quit the PRD.

This decision, if confirmed, will lead to a realignment of the Left in Mexico. A weaker radical Left will probably help the old traditional ruling party, the PRI, which has won all but one of the important elections in Mexico since Felipe Calderón Hinojosa retained the presidency for the rightwing PAN in 2006.

The PRI and the PRD are both members of the Socialist International. In the 1990s the PRI was dominated by technocrats who seemed embarrassed by the party's leftwing origins. The current PRI leadership is more populist and, in tune with the times, less certain that a policy of allowing markets to flourish delivers the best results economically and socially.

López Obrador, who was a hugely successful, populist, mayor of Mexico City, is the most prominent (and polarising) leftwinger in the country. Without him the PRD, which has done poorly in recent elections, will become a very different party. López Obrador has made his career out of opposition. He was almost certainly cheated of the governorship of Tabasco by electoral fraud in 1994 but the campaign he waged against that injustice propelled him first to the PRD party presidency and then to the mayorship of Mexico City.

López Obrador was the Left's candidate for the presidency in 2006 and was backed not only by the PRD but also by two smaller parties, Convergencia and the Partido del Trabajo (which together make up the Frente Amplio Progresista [FA]). López Obrador was narrowly and, he says, unfairly, defeated in the presidential elections. He has subsequently refused to accept the result and the fact that Felipe Calderon is president. López Obrador calls himself Mexico's legitimate president and campaigns around the country against the government's economic policies, notably its attempt to reform the state oil monopoly, Petróleos Mexicanos (Pemex). Arguably, López Obrador's campaign neutered the government's original reform proposals.

The announcement that López Obrador and the radical FAP would split from the PRD came from López Obrador's brother, Pí­o. Ostensibly, López Obrador is threatening to go because the PRD has resumed formal relations with the federal government. López Obrador and his supporters regard the federal government as illegitimate because, they claim, it won the 2006 elections through fraud. There is no unequivocal evidence of fraud, though, equally, there was no complete recount of the votes cast in the presidential contest. 

López Obrador is really going because his radical faction of the party was defeated in controversial elections to elect a new party president in March 2008. The elections were held in March, but the party could not agree on who had won. Eventually, the national elections' tribunal ruled that Jesús Ortega had defeated a López Obradorista, Alejandro Encinas. The radicals did not accept this verdict and claim that Ortega and his faction are conniving with the government. The radicals argue that the state should not decide who should be the PRD president.

Ortega had tried three times before to become PRD party president, but was defeated successively by López Obrador, Amalí­a Garcí­a and Rosario Robles.

On 14 December the PRD's national congress resolved not to go into electoral alliances with other political parties. This would mean the end of the FAP, which has provided López Obrador with a platform.

Ortega and his faction argue, plausibly, that the smaller parties have done much better from the alliances than the PRD. The other implication of this decision is that the PRD hierarchy, now controlled by López Obrador's rivals, would have complete control over the selection of candidates.

The big question is which of the PRD's other leading politicians will follow López Obrador out of the party. Ricardo Monreal, a former PRD governor of Zacatecas and a senator, has already gone. Marcelo Ebrard, López Obrador's lieutenant, who is now mayor of Mexico City, has the biggest decision to make. Ebrard has already indicated that he wants to run for the presidency in 2012: it is far from clear that López Obrador would yield to this aspiration.

Ebrard's decision could determine what happens to the Left in Mexico. The PRD's bastion is Mexico City, but the party's managers and activists are, mostly, from Ortega's Nueva Izquierda faction. A split in the PRD in Mexico City could mean that a candidate from either the PAN or the PRI could be the next mayor of Mexico City. Mexican elections are single-round affairs: the winner does not have to get a majority of the votes cast

Pí­o López Obrador said that his brother would make the split from the PRD official at a rally in the main square in Mexico City on 25 January. López Obrador had been planning a national tour from January 2009.

Although it still seems certain that López Obrador will sever ties with the PRD, both sides immediately had second thoughts. On 16 December López Obrador supporters backtracked on claims that he was about to resign from the PRD. On 17 December Ortega said that he would meet López Obrador.

The dominant Nueva Izquierda (NI) faction of the PRD has been careful not to shut the door completely on López Obrador: one of the NI's prominent members carefully noted that what Pí­o had actually said concerned the future of the PT and Convergencia more than whether López Obrador would actually leave the PRD.

On 5 January the Ortega faction indicated that it was prepared to nominate supporters of López Obrador as candidates for winnable seats in the forthcoming mid-term congressional elections.  The first indications are that López Obrador will spurn the latest peace offering.

What López Obrador seems to be planning is to launch another extra-parliamentary challenge to the government. This strategy was successful in 2008 in neutering the government's proposals for a fundamental reform of Pemex.

Cisen: On 4 January the Centro de Investigación y Seguridad Nacional (Cisen) announced that it would spend at least M$500,000 (US$37,000) in 2009 on public relations. The PR spending is a result of the Cisen's likely role in vetting candidates for the forthcoming congressional elections. The Instituto Federal Electoral and Mexico's main political parties want to use Cisen to ensure that drug gangsters or their allies are not elected to executive or legislative positions. Hitherto the Cisen has been low profile. Since 2001 it has issued only 24 press communiqués.

Ebrard: On 12 January the government of Mexico City, headed by Marcelo Ebrard announced its own economic stimulus package. Unusually for a leftwing populist the main thrust of the plan to preserve jobs is to cut spending. Ebrard's 10-point plan aims to save M$700m (US$50m), which will be used to protect jobs and keep the incomes of the low paid up.

Mexican elections in 2009

5 July
Mid term congressional elections for all 500 seats in lower house

Campeche - elections for governor, state legislature and 11 mayors
Colima - elections for governor, state legislature and 10 mayors
Nuevo León - elections for governor, state legislature and 51 mayors
Querétaro - elections for governor, state legislature and 18 mayors
San Luis Potosí­ - elections for governor, state legislature and 58 mayors
Sonora - elections for governor, state legislature and 72 mayors
Distrito Federal - elections for Legislative Assembly and 16 borough presidents
Guanajuato - elections for state legislature and 46 mayors
Jalisco - elections for state legislature and 125 mayors
Estado de  México - elections for state legislature and 125 mayors
Morelos - elections for state legislature and 33 mayors

18 October
Coahuila - elections for 38 mayors
Tabasco - elections for state legislature and 17 mayors

NB On 1 February   Quintana Roo - Special municipal election for Tulum which is a completely new municipality.

• Amalia Solorzano, the widow of President Lázaro Cárdenas, who nationalised oil companies in Mexico, died on 12 December 2008. Solórzano is famous for donating her jewellery to pay compensation to the oil companies, which were nationalised in 1938. President Cárdenas himself died in 1970. Their son is Cuauhtémoc Cárdenas, the founder of the PRD.

• Mexico City mayor Marcelo Ebrard himself will take a a 10% cut in his salary as part of an economic rescue package for the city. Another 1,300 senior city officials will also see a similar pay cut. Ebrard currently earns M$76,000 (US$5,450) a month. He said that the money saved on wages would go into a fund to provide medicine and food for 1.8m poor people.