AMLO leaves the PRD

After years of threats and campaigning for other parties, finally AMLO took the logical step of leaving the PRD. The reason? The fact that his supporters lost the vote in the PRD's national council this weekend, when the party voted in favor of holding a referendum to ask its members whether to go in alliance with the PAN in Mexico State, or not.

Nor this time is the rupture - or rapture - complete, however. AMLO had long threatened to pedir licencia, or ask for a "leave of absence," disregarding, to be sure, that no such mechanism exist within the PRD or any other party: Either you are a member of the party, or you are not.

Be that as it may: The reason for AMLO's departure speaks volumes. You lose the vote, and you leave. And not only this: You lose a vote on whether to hold a vote among party members and solicit their opinions - AMLO had opposed holding such a referendum.

Mas claro que el agua no puede ser.

AMLO made the announcement in a meeting in Texcoco, where he was campaigning for Alejandro Encinas. Yet the decision appears to have caught the latter somewhat unawares, as Encinas seemed unsure of how to respond:

"A resolution such as the one that is raised before me goes far beyond the realm of personal decisions, as it involves a decision to break with the PRD and move toward a scenario of two candidates and two different projects in 2012."

Indeed it does. For the sake of PRD and the left, one can only hope that Encinas, upon this realization, will choose not to help this worst-case scenario come true.

The "citizen candidacy" debate

Senator José González Morfín, who is the head of PAN's group in the Senate, came out strongly in favor of "citizen candidacies," that is, candidates not emanating from parties, for elected office, and claimed PAN's 40-strong group of senators would back this.

González Morfín touch upon the conventional arguments: Yes, Mexicans have a constitutional right to be candidates, but are blocked from being so unless they go through a party; this is anti-democratic, etc.

The senator said PAN would back non-party, "citizen" candidates on all levels - mayors, deputies, senators, even the president. He criticized a proposal from PRI that went in the other direction, requiring 18 months of party membership before being allowed to run for office.

In a time of (or perennial?) discontent with political parties, such proposals do strike a chord and certainly warrant a hearing. But for all the talk of the glories of a "citizen," non-party candidate for the presidency, no mention is made of the potential negative implications of this.

For one, in Mexico, one can imagine a situation where a "citizen" candidate, riding a wave of anti-party sentiments, can simply, through means legal or not, "buy" him or herself the presidency. What if the narcos decide to postulate a candidate? El Chapo throwing his billions behind a person promising to put an end to the drug war and withdraw the army? It may sound and be far fetched, but let's keep in mind that parties, for all their flaws, do function as some kind of filter here.

But let us also look to Latin America: What have been the consequences of these "citizen" candidates? The cases of Alberto Fujimori and Fernando Collor de Mello, non-party presidents of Peru and Brazil, leap to mind. Even if the candidate would be a competent democrat, they would face likely problems of not having legislative backing from a reliable party. And what if they are outright criminals like Fujimori and Collor de Mello, elected on what they claimed to be a mandate to rule as they pleased? The results were not pretty.

By all means: There are arguments to be made for allowing citizen candidates. But so far there has been virtually no mention of the potential pitfalls of "anti-party" candidates, which need to be brought into the debate.

Toward a defining moment for PRD: Party national council votes YES to vote on alliance

129-72. That is the result of the vote held this weekend in PRD's national council, where a majority favors  having a vote among party members to settle the question of whether or not to go into alliance with the PAN in upcoming gubernatorial elections.

By extension, it is also a measure of strength between the moderate social democratic camp in the PRD, and the anti-institutional movement advocates of AMLO's supporters. These are not wholly coterminous - there are, of course, very valid ideological arguments to oppose an alliance with PAN - but given the polarization and larger division within the party over whether to be a more institutionalized European-style social democratic party, or whether to be a much more personalistic movement-party around AMLO, the vote essentially reflects the strength of these two groups.

It also reflects the inherent contradictions of the "populist" and "radical" sectors around AMLO, which so often claim to represent the "people" and party base against a purported hijacked party leadership, yet which in the end opposed actually leaving this decision to the party members. The logic may be summarized as follows: why bother to ask when one already "knows" the will of the people? It also exposes them as rather than representing the people, to have actually fear of their opinions.

The "G-8" group, consisting of factions loyal to AMLO, already announced they would not participate in the vote over the alliance. This begs the question: Why did they even engage in the vote in PRD's national council, when they had already decided to not participate? Because these group, whose largest component is the IDN led by Dolores Padierna, does not respect the majority decisions, e.g democracy, of the party. If it loses a vote, rather than to accept the outcome, it simply decides to ignore it. In the long run, as the PRD seeks to establish itself as a modern, democratic, liberal party of the center-left, would the PRD simply be better off without them?