Mexico & Nafta - December 2010 (ISSN 1741-444X)
Another key election
The ruling Partido Acción Nacional (PAN) is to vote on a new party president on 4 December. The result will go a long way towards determining the party's candidate for the 2012 presidential election. Four of the five candidates are running hard for the post.
The electorate is made up of the national party council (Consejo Nacional), which comprises 380 national councillors, including President Felipe Calderón himself. Besides choosing a new party president for the next two years, the party will also select a new national executive council (Comité Ejecutivo Nacional, CEN), which will take the party through to the 2012 elections.
The current party president, César Nava, who was previously President Calderón's private secretary, has managed to stabilise the party after his predecessor, Germán Martínez Cázares, resigned following the party's disastrous showing in the midterm elections in 2009.
The mere fact that five candidates are competing for the party stewardship shows how weak Calderón's position has become. The last two party presidents were elected unopposed. Calderón himself had fallen out with the-then party president, Manuel Espino, who steered the party through the 2006 elections.
Calderón, increasingly, appears to represent the most conservative wing of the PAN. As his administration has proved largely unsuccessful, his allies have begun to re-invent themselves as 'neo-panistas'. This wing propelled Vicente Fox to the presidency in 2000 and registered the party's groundbreaking electoral triumphs in northern Mexico in the 1990s.
Interestingly, although initially most of Calderón's critics were prominent members of the Fox government (2000-2006), an increasing number of former Calderón supporters are now also unhappy with Calderonismo's influence on the party.
Nevertheless, Calderón does have a candidate: Gustavo Madero. Although Calderón himself has yet to endorse him, Madero enjoys the backing of Nava, who is lobbying hard for him. Madero, a senator from Chihuahua in northern Mexico, from where most neo-panistas hail, is seen as a key link between this group and the Calderonistas. Notably, his candidacy is funded by a group of PAN entrepreneurs from Nuevo Laredo.
The first surprise on the list, and probably the most unlikely candidate for the party leadership post, is the former commissioner of the national institute of migration (INM), Cecilia Romero Castillo. Romero was forced to resign her position after the August massacre of 72 immigrants in Tamaulipas. She is close to Calderón and has worked with him since he took office in 2006 (as part of his government transition team), before being appointed to the INM. However, Romero is believe to be a member of 'El Yunque' (the Anvil), a politically influential conservative catholic secret society (to which Espino is also supposed to belong). Romero represents the far right, from which most Calderonismo opponents are trying to distance themselves. She is also Nava's former mother-in-law, which may add to the bitterness of her campaign. She is supposed to have disobeyed Calderón by launching her candidacy. She is unlikely to win, as her refusal to resign after the Tamaulipas massacre made her an unpopular figure both inside and outside the PAN.
At the other end of the spectrum is Calderón's first (and brief) choice as interior minister, Francisco Ramírez Acuña, who is now a federal deputy. He has had a long political career in the PAN bastion of Jalisco, where he has served at all levels (mayor, governor, in the state and federal legislatures and also in the cabinet). Ramírez was dropped from cabinet in January 2008, to be replaced by Calderón's ill-fated chum, Juan Camilo Mouriño. Mouriño was killed in a plane crash in November 2008.
Ramírez is generally seen as the main anti-Calderón candidate, largely because his candidacy is backed by Santiago Creel. Interior secretary under Vicente Fox, Creel was Fox's pick to be the PAN presidential candidate in 2006, but he lost the party primaries to Calderón in 2005. Since then, along with Fox, he has been a critic of the Calderón administration.
Finally, the biggest surprise on the list of candidates is the young federal deputy Roberto Gil Zuarth. Currently, Gil is the PAN's coordinator in the chamber of deputies. Gil has been highly critical of corruption in the party and has serious differences with Nava. Perhaps more importantly, his candidacy is backed by two prominent former members of Calderón's cabinet turned harsh critics. Both the former secretary of interior, Fernando Gómez Mont, and a former party president, Martínez Cázares, are backing Gil.
Martínez Cázares was forced to step down after the party's poor result in the July 2009 federal elections, while Gómez Mont resigned and left the PAN this year after publicly falling out with Calderón over the issue of forging electoral alliances with other parties. Having the support of these two, Gil is seen as a conciliatory figure by estranged party members. As Gómez Mont stated, “If Gil becomes president, I will re-affiliate myself to the party, as there is an urge to renovate the PAN's national leadership." Conversely, Gil is also seen as the biggest threat to Madero's candidacy, as he has the potential to steal votes away from him. In other words, Gil's candidacy has the potential to create the rumoured split in Calderonismo.
As soon as Gil presented his candidacy to the CEN, questions were raised about his eligibility to register. According to the PAN statutes, candidates for the CEN must have at least five years of party membership in order to be eligible. Gil has been a PAN member for only two years. National councillor Juan José Rodríguez Pratts announced on 24 October that he would challenge Gil's candidacy at the electoral tribunal of the federal judiciary (TEPJF). However, Gil and his supporters claim that the party statutes do not specify whether the five-year membership requirement applies to party presidential candidates.
Gil's pitch is that as PAN party president he would regain the people's confidence and win the national presidency in 2012 with a panista candidate. Gil also conceded that the PAN and the federal government had made many mistakes over the last 10 years and had failed to take advantage of the opportunities they had been afforded: “we have not been able to complete Mexico's transformation," he said.
The fifth candidate is a PAN senator, Blanca Judith Díaz, but her campaign
appears to be going nowhere. She is most outspoken about Gil and his
inexperience.
Manuel J. Clouthier Carrillo, a federal deputy for Sinaloa,
formerly of the PAN and son of the PAN 1988 presidential candidate Manuel J.
'Maquío' Clouthier del Rincón, claims he was prevented from rejoining the PAN
and registering as a candidate by Nava. Earlier in the year, Clouthier sparked a
major controversy when he accused the Calderón government of fighting only the
Juárez gang in its war against organised crime and not doing enough to fight
drug-trafficking gangs in his home state of Sinaloa. Clouthier was forced to
resign from the PAN and become an independent. In an interview with Proceso
magazine in February, he said that the “insecurity crisis in Sinaloa is greater
than the one in Ciudad Juárez, Chihuahua", adding that “Calderón has allowed the
consolidation of narco-politics in Sinaloa".
Clouthier is politically important because of his name and the fact that his sister is married to Heriberto Félix Guerra, the minister in charge of Sedesol, the social welfare ministry, which is the country's biggest spending ministry.
Baja California: On 3 November the Partido Acción Nacional (PAN) nominated Marcos Covarrubias, a former member of the Partido de la Revolución Democrática (PRD), as its candidate for the governorship of the small state of Baja California Sur in 2011. The nomination suggests that the successful alliances between the PAN and the PRD in 2010 will continue into 2011. This is likely to boost the chances of Marcelo Ebrard, the mayor of Mexico City, winning the presidency in 2012. Ebrard supports alliances with the PAN, though he says that he does not want an alliance for the presidential elections.
López Obrador in the federal congress: The lower house of congress failed to
make many changes to the 2011 budget. Indeed, only 3% of the draft budget
submitted by the government to congress on 8 September was changed before the
congress approved it just before the deadline on 15 November. The lower
chamber's power over the budget used to be more apparent. In 2004, Vicente Fox
threatened to use his presidential veto after congress pushed through a host of
changes. This eventually led the supreme court to issue an equivocal decision on
whether the president had the power to veto congressional budget changes.
This time, the budget was approved by 454 votes to 13. All 13 opponents were
supporters of Andrés Manuel López Obrador, who Calderón narrowly defeated in the
2006 presidential election.
López Obrador in the federal congress: The lower house of
congress failed to make many changes to the 2011 budget. Indeed, only 3% of the
draft budget submitted by the government to congress on 8 September was changed
before the congress approved it just before the deadline on 15 November. The
lower chamber's power over the budget used to be more apparent. In 2004, Vicente
Fox threatened to use his presidential veto after congress pushed through a host
of changes. This eventually led the supreme court to issue an equivocal decision
on whether the president had the power to veto congressional budget changes.
This time, the budget was approved by 454 votes to 13. All 13 opponents were
supporters of Andrés Manuel López Obrador, who Calderón narrowly defeated in the
2006 presidential election.
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