Beyond cynicism: Peña Nieto's attempt to legally block alliances is anti-democratic

In a stunning move of cynicism, PRI and PVEM together went a head and introduced an initiative to change the electoral code in Mexico State in order to prevent the PRD and PAN to have a common candidate in 2011, when Enrique Peña Nieto's successor will be elected. 

Adrián Fuentes, local Green party deputy, said the initiative aimed at preventing two or more parties from having a common candidate, if they didn't share "values, political platform, program of action, principles or ideology." PAN coordinator Óscar Sánchez Juárez rightly denounced the move as a "desparate act," that, if approved, would be a drastic step backward for democracy. Luis Sánchez Jiménez, president of the PRD mexiquense, said the move demonstrates that "both the PRI and the PVEM are scared of democracy." 

Even though PRI has a a majority of seven deputies out of 11 on the legislature's commission of legal affairs, which will first deal with the proposed legislation, it seems unlikely that this will pass a full vote in congress. Yet it serves to demonstrate, and quite starkly so, two major points, beyond PVEM's disgracing of itself (to recall, this party has ran as an alliance partner with both PAN and the PRI, and is currently a national ally of PRI)

1) The lengths to which Governor Enrique Peña Nieto is willing to go to block a PAN-PRD alliance, and 2) the new PRI looks just the same as the old PRI, and is more than willing to engage in opportunistic institutional engineering to have it its way. 

PAN. for its part, seems very bent on maintaining a PRD-PAN common candidacy; the question remains whether Andrés Manuel López Obrador and his movement-party advocates in the PRD will manage to block it this weekend.