Alfonso Ramírez Cuéllar calls for mass elections for PRD. When will they ever learn?

It sounds all wonderful and democratic: To elect a party leader, why not open it up to all citizens, not just PRD members, in a completely open mass election? This is exactly what Alfonso Ramírez Cuéllar is proposing should be the manner in which PRD elects its new leader. Yet given the history of PRD's internal elections by party base, which without one single exception has been a dirty cohchinero and led to destructive infighting, chaos, even violence - and we're here only talking of PRD members, not a completely open election to all, party cadres and non-members alike - why on earth would Ramírez Cuéllar expect the next election to be any different? How many times do you keep doing the same thing and expect a different result? It's simply stunning to hear such a proposal, as it is still less than two years since PRD ended its last internal leadership feud, when the Electoral Tribunal (TEPJF) ruled that Jesús Ortega had won the PRD presidency. The fight had been going on for 8 - eighth! - months, yet now Ramírez Cuéllar is arguing the party should do the same thing, even upping the ante by allowing non-party members to participate?

The initiative if nothing else demonstrate that Ramírez Cuéllar has come down on AMLO's side: PRD's former presidential candidate would clearly be able to use the movement around his Legitimate Government as muscle to vote in the election and elect a more pliant leader than Ortega is. To recall, this is exactly what Alejandro Encinas, who was AMLO's candidate but lost to Ortega in 2008, wanted at that time.

When it comes to leadership elections, PAN (Partido Acción Nacional) gets it: Let the National Council, which is elected directly by members, have a vote on who is to be the next party president.

 If PRD is serious about avoiding debilitating internal feuds, and if its factions really are willing to submit to a democratic majority, namely the National Council elected by the PRD base, the PRD should discard the mass-base election fetishism of Ramírez Cuéllar and others, and go for a similar mechanism when choosing its next party presiddent.