AMLO has started yet another "tour" of Mexico State, entitled, according to various banners, the "Loyalty Tour," which is both a thinly disguised pre-campaign for the Mexican presidency, as well as more immediately a mechanism to drum up opposition among the PRD base against an alliance with the PAN to present a common candidate for governor of Mexico State in 2011. The label is quite fitting: What AMLO is doing is to call for his followers within and outside the PRD to show loyalty to him, rather than the actual party leadership - to follow the man and his "cause" rather than to abide by the decisions of PRD's official elected party organs. AMLO has in general ridden roughshod over the PRD's official leadership the past decade, and if anything his dismissal of the party and the rejection of its positions when they do not correspond to his own, has merely intensified, and in his speech yesterday, in a direct attack on the current PRD leadership declared it "better that they once and for all remove the mask and go and join the PAN."
Despite the fact that the misnamed "Workers Party" PT (Partido del Trabajo), an unconditional AMLO ally since 2006, earlier appeared quite positive to a mega alliance of PRD-PT-Convergencia with the PAN in order to beat the PRI, AMLO again gave PT and its leader Alberto Anaya Gutiérrez an ultimatum: Either you reject the alliances, or else.
The PT, to recall, is far less principled than it may appear - the party almost went with PRI in 2006, and its ultra loyalty to AMLO can best be explained from the fact that his support allows it enough votes to keep its party registry. Hence, just like AMLO forced the PT to leave coalitions it had entered where the PAN participated in this summer's gubernatorial election, AMLO now forced the PT to take a public stand against participating in any anti-PRI alliance in Mexico State in 2011 should it include the PAN.
AMLO, for his part, declared he will not campaign for the PRD at all in Mexico State should its leadership join an alliance with the PAN, the party "that stole the Presidency from us."
Expect him to to everything in his powers the coming weeks to continue sabotaging such an alliance, and to call upon his followers to do the same.
Enrique Peña Nieto must be smiling from ear to ear.
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