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

On 23 February Andrés Manuel López Obrador, a radical left-winger, withdrew his (attempted and much trumpeted) resignation from the main left-wing party, the Partido de la Revolución Democrática (PRD). López Obrador's manoeuvrings are designed to do two things: first to prevent the PRD going into an alliance with the ruling Partido Acción Nacional (PAN) in the Estado de México, this year's most important gubernatorial election; and second, to weaken the grip a rival faction, known as Los Chuchos, has on the PRD party machine. What he has achieved, however, is to show how weak and divided the PRD is.

The PRD's current problems, however, do not mean that it has become as negligible a force as the opinion polls suggest. López Obrador himself still commands the support of a solid 10% of the electorate. Furthermore, his successor as mayor of Mexico City, Marcelo Ebrard, is a strong candidate for the presidency in 2012. Ebrard has been busy polishing his international profile, most recently at the World Economic Forum in Davos.

The big issue for Ebrard is winning the Left's (principally the PRD's but also the Partido del Trabajo's and Convergencia's) nomination for the presidency. If he does that, he will be in a strong position, because the main opposition party, the Partido Revolucionario Institucional (PRI), has a couple of candidates who are already at odds with each other while the ruling Partido Acción Nacional (PAN) appears to have no-one. Admittedly, at this point six years ago, the odds on Felipe Calderón (then a none- too-successful party president, federal deputy and sacked energy minister), winning the presidency would have been ridiculously long.

López Obrador's attempt to leave the PRD is a blatant effort to derail the negotiations between the PAN and the PRD over a joint candidate for governor in the July elections. As several political commentators in Mexico have pointed out, López Obrador has, in fact, been a semi-detached member of the PRD for most of the past five years. He has allied himself more with Convergencia and the PT than with the PRD, though the only place he campaigned directly against a PRD candidate was in the municipal election in Iztapalapa, a borough of Mexico City where the PAN-dominated electoral authorities interfered in the result of a PRD primary. 

In 2010 the alliance between the PRD and the PAN was successful in three states (Oaxaca, Puebla and Sinaloa, although in each state the victor was a former prií­sta) and again in Guerrero this year (again with the same caveat). To be fair, López Obrador, though stating his opposition to all four alliances, did not actively campaign against them or try to split the Left's vote in the election.

The PRD and the PAN's dance in the Estado is slowing down the whole political process. The PRI itself has not chosen a candidate to succeed Enrique Peña Nieto, the current governor and the frontrunner for the PRI's presidential nomination, and hence the presidency, in 2012. The PRI, or more accurately Peña Nieto, is delaying its decision because it wants to know what its candidate will be facing.

Formally, candidates do not have to register for the 3 July election in the Estado until 1 May. The PRI party president in the Estado, Ricardo Aguilar Castillo, says that the party will spend most of March in consultation with its members about its manifesto and then hold a very brief (28 March to 6 April) primary before a party convention at which its candidate for governor will be announced. This abbreviated timetable seems designed to ensure that Peña Nieto will decide who the candidate should be and that there will be no damaging split in the PRI in the Estado.

The PRD national committee, dominated by Los Chuchos, voted on 19 February to hold a vote in the Estado on the putative alliance with the PAN. The problem is that the PRD national committee cannot decide whether it should hold a state-wide poll on whom its candidate should be, what question it should ask or whom it should ask. Should it ask all voters? Or just PRD members? Or all members of the PRD, Convergencia and the PT? If the poll is of all voters it may well be distorted by prií­stas who will vote the line recommended by Peña Nieto, who opposes any alliance between the PRD and the PAN in the Estado.

The odds must be that the PRD will abandon the idea of an alliance with the PAN in the Estado. It may be that Ebrard, a convinced Alianista, recognises that such a result is inevitable in the Estado, so pushing for an alliance there is doomed. His new position of cordial relations with López Obrador means that he benefits if López Obrador's candidate in the Estado, Alejandro Encinas, does well. If Encinas comes a poor second (or even third), however, Ebrard's arguments that the PRD (and the Left in general) needs to broaden its appeal for the 2012 presidential election are also enhanced.

The PRD also, incidentally, needs to pick a new party president after Lázaro Cárdenas Batel, the former governor of Michoacán and the grandson of President Lázaro Cárdenas del Rí­o (1934-1940), who nationalised the oil industry, refused the job. The PRD is due to hold a party congress in March to pick its new president. The PRD's latest idea is to revise the part statutes so that Lázaro Cardenas's father, Cuauhtémoc, the PRD's founder, can become party president.