Voices on the PRI's likely return to power

Many a personality has been commenting the past days on the likely return of the PRI to the Mexican presidency in 2012.  Fox, notably, seemed resigned to the idea that the PRI will win in 2012, declaring recently, "Right now, that's what dice are saying, the dice and the facts." As might be expected, Fox' predictions were hardly well received by the PAN; big shots such as party leader César Nava and PAN Senate group leader José González Morfín rejected the statements, and instead called on Fox to involve himself more in party politics rather than criticizing it from the outside. (After some heavy twittering, he now backtracked and said he "did not predict PRI's victory," but that it was to function as a warning call.

Be that it as it may, Manuel Bartlett, former PRI interior minister and governor of Puebla, somewhat estranged from his party and on good terms with Andrés Manuel López Obrador, affirmed that PRI would return thanks to the "disenchamtment PAN, but that the PRI lacks a national project and that its triumph would only be due to "mistakes and the disaster in which the PAN has occurred in the exercise of power." It is hardly a ringing endorsement of a PRI presidential candidate. Is Bartlett throwing his weight behind López Obrador?

Finally, Francisco Labastida Ochoa, defeated 2000 PRI presidential candidate, took offense at declarations made by writer Mario Vargas Llosa to the newspaper La Jornada, in connection with being bestowed an honorary degree by UNAM, where he noted that even if the PRI returns it would hardly have the absolute power of the past "perfect dictatorship," the felicitous phrase coined by the Peruvian writer to describe the 1929-2000 priiato. Labastida dixit:

"His [Vargas Lloosa's] political sympathies overtake him, his absolute conservative ideology of the right, and this prevents him from seeing that the party [PRI] has had many different governments. Lázaro Cárdenas belonged to the tricolor, as did Carlos Salinas the Gortari. PRI has not been uniform over the years. This is the first misunderstanding of this writer. The other is to claim that for 70 years one lived through a perfect dictatorship."

Really? If Labastida can come up with a better turn, I wish he'd share it. It is perhaps even more revealing that Labastida reaches all the way back to the 1930s to find a progressive PRI politician to contrast with Salinas. One would have liked to ask the senator, where would he place Peña Nieto - with the former or the latter? AMLO has the answer ready: As part of his "loyalty tour" (loyalty to him as opposed to the PRD), he gleefully exhibits a photo of an embracing Peña Nieto and Salinas. To AMLO, a victory of Peña Nieto and the return of PRI would be akin to "the return of Santa Anna."

Yet if that is the case, why is he so adamantly attacking the PAN-PRD alliances and claiming that PRI and PAN are all the same?

First PRD-PAN alliance confirmed: Nayarit 2011.

The PRD state council in Nayarit voted unanimously to go in an electoral alliance in 2011 when the small coastal state is voting for governor. While the PAN won't decide until October, it is pretty much a done deal; unlike the PRD, the final decision within the PAN will be taken centrally by the PAN's National Council, which clearly supports the PAN-PRD alliances to stop the return of PRI.


PRD national deputy Guadalupe Acosta Naranjo has been preparing his candidacy for quite a while, and appears an exceptionally strong candidate to replace PRI governor Ney González.. While he is a close ally of PRD national president Jesús Ortega and a central member of the Nueva Izquierda, the largest party faction in PRD, he has pretty much buena onda with even the lopezobradoristas, and this should augur well for a unified PRD in the upcoming elections. 


However, given that AMLO has hysterically declared the PRD-PAN alliances to be "treason," regardless of whether the PRD state councils express support for them or not, Acosta Naranjo may still be in for (not so) "friendly fire" from members of is own party. Will AMLO also seek to sabotage this candidacy, as he has proclaimed he will do in Mexico State? Is Acosta Naranjo, then, also a traitor?

AMLO's supporters physically blocks the PRD from reaching 2/3 majority in favor of alliances

Another farce. This is in the simplest terms what happened: Just as the PRD state council was inching toward an overwhelming majority vote in the PRD mexiquense or Mexico State party branch in a vote over whether to join in an alliance with the PAN,  AMLO's supporters decided to take the council directorate by force to stop the vote count when it was inching close to a whopping 2/3 majority in favor of the alliances. Ahain, AMLO's supporters, in Mexico State represented by the corrientes or party factions Izquierda Democrática Nacional (IDN), Grupo de Acción Política (GAP) and Unión de Izquierdas (Unir), demonstrated they have no intention of accepting the result of any vote they do not win. The andresmanuelistas resorted to direct action - physical force - when the vote reached 168-86, or just one vote short of a 2/3 majority.

As the votes were counted and it was clear that a majority of the PRD's state council favored an alliance with PAN in order to beat the PRI, AMLO's supporters protested and demanded the state council should rather vote with a 2/3 majority. While this has been standard practice in the national council, it is not stipulated that the state councils also have to vote with a 2/3 majority. Even so, the pro-alliance forces, above all the factions Nueva Izquierda (NI) and  Alianza Democrática Nacional (ADN), gathered a surprisingly high number of votes: the count had reached 168 in favor to 86 in against, or just one vote right short of a 2/3 majority. AMLO's supporters then proceeded to storm and "take" the speaker dais, effectively blocking the vote, and a fistfight ensued. The state leadership declared a 15 day recess.

(It's rather remarkable to read the same news event covered in La Jornada, which these days has absolutely no shame when it comes to twisting the facts in favor of AMLO; in their coverage, PRD "suspended the council after the corrientes ADN and NI didn't reach the necessary votes to approve the resolution that would permit the PRD to ally with PAN." It's a pity that La Jornada's activism has become of such a degree that it is increasingly useless as a news source to cover PRD and AMLO events.)

So the issue will unfortunately not be settled yet. AMLO continues to hurl accusations that the PRD has fallen under President Felipe Calderón's spell, and threatens to postulate his own candidate should the PRD and PAN run a common gubernatorial candidate. To recall: in 2005, AMLO campaigned incessantly for the PRD-candidate, a non-party businesswoman forced upon the party by AMLO, who moreover rode roughshod over the state PRD organization and instead preferred using his own paid Redes Ciudadanas, or paid canvassers directly loyal to him. Even when the state PRD backed the candidate, Yeidckol Polevnsky, she barely pulled 22% of the votes. Whether he truly believes that an "independent" candidate promoted by him would do better in 2011 is a moot question; he will go to any lengths to sabotage the official PRD as long as they do not blindly follows his will. In AMLO's words, should the state council approve the alliance, they will remain only with "shell":

"If the PRD leaders have not dignity, we are going to show them that those from below, the militants and sympathizers, we don't want a pact with the PAN."

To hell with any democratic votes within the party itself, to hell with respecting PRD's organs and institutional processes: AMLO will take his followers and go. And Enrique Peña Nieto will be smiling ever broader.