PRD and AMLO: Post-election reactions

While Guadalupe Acosta Naranjo and Luis Sánchez Jiménez accused AMLO of having much blame for the disastrous results this past Sunday, PRD leader Jesús Zambrano, still hopeful for some kind of reconciliation with  is former presidential candidate, called for not putting the blame on individuals. Alejandro Encinas also dismissed that AMLO had any blame.

AMLO himself said such criticism "doesn't even deserve a reflection, a reply."

Yet Marcelo Ebrard made it pretty clear what he felt: "Alejandro Encinas said he didn't want an alliance, we'll do it like this, well, here are the results...."

PRD campaign in Mexico State: Remarkable unity

In a remarkable display of unity, PRD leader in Mexico State, Luis Sánchez Jiménez, appeared together with the left coalition candidate Alejandro Encinas for the start of the latter's campaign.

Remarkable, because Sánchez Jiménez, who was the vice president of the chamber of deputies and a man I had the pleasure of interviewing on many occasions, was also a big proponent of a PRD-PAN alliance in the state, and complained bitterly of the campaign of Andrés Manuel López Obrador to scuttle said alliance, which he did succeed in doing.

Luis Sánchez was, to boot, appointed officially as Encinas' campaign coordinator, though it remains to be seen if this will merely be de jure rather than de facto - something akin to Jesús Ortega's position as the nominal head of AMLO's 2006 campaign.

Yet regardless, in Sánchez' words: "I am an institutional man and I think institutions is something that Mexican politics urgently needs."

¡Órale! If only the PRD had more people like Sánchez. You lose, but then you rally behind your party candidate regardless.

Also of note: El Universal reports that even Cuauhtémoc Cárdenas will appear with Encinas. While I regard a photo of AMLO-Encinas-Cárdenas a remote possibility, it would be of immense importance for the party, which still stands a chance, however small, of winning the state.

So it is official: Encinas is going for the candidacy

It's official: Alejandro Encinas is going for the candidacy of the PRD, as well as its not-too-reliable partners the PT and Convergencia, as candidate for governor of Mexico State/Edomex.

Some PRD members, notably its party president Jesús Ortega Martínez, and Luis Sánchez Jiménez, leader of the PRD in Mexico state, emphasized that Encinas is not a candidate yet: Other aspirants for the candidacy exist. Encinas will clearly have to go some form of party vote, such as a closed or open primary, and the PRD have yet to decide on how to proceed with this.

PAN, meanwhile, as noted earlier, remain enthusiastic on the national level, yet not too keen on the local level: PAN party president of the Mexico State branch said that Encinas "is not a unity candidate."
Yet should PAN nonetheless be convinced into voting for Encinas, which would include the unlikely of not presenting its own candidate, Encinas does have a shot at winning.

Dramatic turn of events in Mexico State: PAN and PRD may drop out of race

cThe leaders of the local branches of the PAN and PRD in Mexico State, Germán Olivares and Luis Sánchez Jiménez respectively, announced that given the skewed playing field resulting from the infamous Ley Peña introduced by Governor Enrique Peña Nieto to disadvantage the opposition, as well as the control by PRI of both the state´s electoral institute and electoral tribual, the parties are considering withdrawing from the race entirely. This happened after listening to the discourses of the Mexico State electoral institute (IEEM) councilors Juan Carlos Villareal, Jesús Jardón Nava, José Martínez Vilchis and Policarpo Montes de Oca, who in essence fully dismissed PAN´s and PRD´s concern regarding the election. The four councilors are fully identified with the PRI, and make out 4 out of the 7 councilors on the IEEM.

This announcement is quite dramatic. According to the party leaders, the executive committees of PAN and PRD will this week evaluate whether they will actually withdraw from the contest.

One worst case scenario coming to mind: PAN and PRD withdraws, while AMLO, convinced as always that "the people" is with him, runs with PT, loses badly, yet his participation legitimizes a 75-percent victory in favor of the PRI candidate.

AMLO´s candidate in Mexico State made up holocaust story

AMLO's choice as his candidate for governor in Mexico State, Yeidckol Polevnsky, has been criticized for a range of reasons, most obviously that she lost badly in her previous attempt (2005) and has minuscule chances of winning in 2011, but also for the reason that as federal senator, she has been very far from a champion of left causes, and has moreover displayed a range of what can only be described as personal failings. It was early revealed that Polevnsky had changed her name and lied about her family lineage, which still remains highly opaque to put it lightly, yet now a further v detail has come to light:

Luis Sánchez Jiménez, the leader of PRD in Mexico State and a former national deputy and mayor of Neza, claims that Polevnsky, in seeking to ingratiate herself with Mexico's Jewish community, made up a story that her grandparents died in the Holocaust.

I find there are few reasons to doubt this story; Sánchez Jiménez is, to use a quaint label, a most honorable man who enjoys great respect both within and outside the PRD, who, unlike Polevnsky and for that matter AMLO himself has an impeccable political trajectory within the political left.
(Let's not forget that AMLO remained a priísta during Mexico's fateful 1988 presidential election, only to later be convinced by Cuahutémoc Cárdenas to join what would become the PRD).

Yet to the leader of Mexico State's PRD chapter, enough is enough: The party is fed up with AMLO's attempt to force upon it Polevnsky as its candidate for governor. The recent revelation, as numerous others, further does not speak well of AMLO's judgment in his choice of Polevnsky as his anointed candidate.

AMLO's dedazo and brazen lie fractures his own coalition

AMLO's top-down heavily personalistic style has finally caught up with him: He is facing a significant rebellion even within his own and most loyal ranks, given his imposition of Yeidckol Polevnsky as "his" candidate for Mexico State in the upcoming gubernatorial election.

According to Daniel Ríos Ávila of Convergencia, AMLO had during his recent "Loyalty Tours" in Mexico State promised a poll/consultation/primary where leaders of Convergencia, PT, and PRD loyal to AMLO would together come up with the best-positioned candidate. This was to take place in January. Yet merely three days after the mass meeting in Toluca where AMLO concluded his 125-municipality tour, it was announced that he had already settled on Yeidckol Polevnsky after conducting his own "poll," apparently. Absolutely no figures have been released here; AMLO's allies were simply to take him on his word, which he already broke by his unilateral decision and appoint Yeidckol Polevnsky in the worst PRI-style dedazo - a party, to recall, that AMLO had belonged to his entire life until well after the infamous July 7, 1988 election, when Cuauhtémoc Cárdenas convinced him to finally ditch his old party.

Now, key allies such as Senator Óscar González says that the Partido del Trabajo (PT) "do not regard well the candidacy of Yeidckol Polevnsky; it doesn't satisfy us."

Leader of the Mexico State PRD, Luis Sánchez Jiménez, points out that, irony of ironies, Polevnsky, a non-party business woman, has long expressed deep admiration for Governor Enrique Peña Nieto, and recalls that she already had her go in 2005, when she came in a poor third, even after PAN.

As Sánchez Jiménez, a popular politician who himself would be a terrific choice as candidate, notes:

We do not accept nor will accept her as a candidate ... we are not obliged to accept impositions of her or anyone; we do not accept the authoritarianism of the former head of [Mexico City]," meaning AMLO.

It seems that many of AMLO's own followers are also reaching the same conclusion.

PRD state branch to decide on PAN-PRD elections: Does it really matter?

The PRD of Mexico State are meeting today to decide finally on the possibility of going in alliance with other parties, principally the Partido Acción Nacional, for the 2011 gubernatorial elections in the state. Ahead of the meeitng of the PRD state council, state party president Luis Sánchez Jiménez asked the party's Comisión de Garantías y Vigilancia, or internal watchdog on rules and procedure, to decide on whether the council requires a simple majority or 2/3 majority vote to approve the alliances.


Andrés Manuel López Obrador, however, has already declared that regardless of the outcome of the vote, he will reject such an alliance, dismissing in the process the the right of the party branch to decide for itself whether to go in an alliance or not, and that he moreover will ask for a "leave of absence" from the PRD - a term that simply does not exist; one is either a member of the party or one is not. More of consequence, Alejandro Encinas, who had earlier denied that he was seeking the nomination for PRD governor, now says he will only run as head of a PRD-PT-Convergencia coalition. That is, should the PRD state council this weekend decide to launch a common candidate with PAN to seek to defeat PRI and its 81-year grip on power in Mexico State, AMLO will launch his own candidate and that will likely be Encinas. In the process, however, the left might well be destroyed in the the state of Mexico, allowing for a PRI successor to Enrique Peña Nieto, and for Peña Nieto to return PRI to the presidency in 2012. 


As I believe Winston Churchill once observed, there are wars, there are civil wars, and then there are... internal party wars - the latter being the most vicious of all. 

Peña Nieto's Law steamrolls through Mexico State; PRI breaks another agreement

Governor Peña Nieto claimed that PRI already had the endorsement of 92 out of Mexico State's 125 municipalities for what has been dubbed "Peña Nieto's Law," given that it blatantly favors the governors presidential ambitions. This is more than the 66 required, though reports of irregularities in this signing process abound: Luis Sánchez Jiménez, leader of the PRD branch in the state, relates that rather than being treated in the local town halls, has simply been signed by the town council leader; in one egregious case, in the PRD-run Valle del Bravo, functionaries of the government showed up at 6 in the morning at the house of the regidora, demanding that she sign some important document regarding gender equality. Only later did she discover she had just endorsed, on behalf of the Valle del Bravo town council, Peña Nieto's Law.

Peña Nieto even has the audacity to claim the electoral alliances, which his law goes a long way to impede, make out a "open fraud" to the electorate. Did he simply forget that his candidacy was a product of such an alliance (PRI-PVEM) in 2005, and that PRI and its allies controls the majority of Mexico State's municipalities due to exactly the same type of alliances?

PRD confirms that as soon as the law is promulgated, it will take it to the Supreme Court. I am glad that finally political scientists, such as Alberto Aziz Nassif in today's El Universal, are finally making themselves heard regarding the blatant opportunism and authoritarianism inherent to steamrolling these laws through in the last moment, for the sole purpose of pushing Peña Nieto's candidacy. As Aziz Nassif notes,

"The logic of adapting the electoral system to the convenience of one of the actors at the expense of the others, is quite simply an authoritarian regression."

Well put. Should there be any remaining doubts, here is PRI's latest move: While it made an explicit agreement with PAN and PRD to share the presidency of the Mexico State Congress - the presidency is a rotating office - it backtracked and reelected by simple majority PRI deputy Ernesto Nemer Álvarez as president.

Peña Nieto and his backers like to present themselves as the "new PRI," as opposed to the old prinosaurios of the past, who governed Mexico since its Revolution. If anything, Peña Nieto has demonstrated that the "new PRI" is if anything even more authoritarian minded than PRI has been for years.

Peña Nieto's frontal assault on democracy: Legislation fast-tracks through Mexico State Congress

The initiative by the Green Party (PVEM) to impede the formation of electoral alliances in the upcoming gubernatorial elections in Mexico State, breezed through the local legislature in Mexico State after a cursory hearing with such a speed that designating it a "fast-track" hardly does it justice.  


What it does:
* While the legislation does pretend to block alliances, it will still allow common candidates, in the sense that PAN and PRD can still present a common one for 2011. However, should this legislation pass the full floor vote, they now basically have to register as one electoral party-coalition, rather than four separate parties  (PAN, PRD-PT-Convergencia) with separate lists for deputies and municipal presidents, as well as, crucially, separate funding. They will only have one common representative at the state electoral institute, which arranges the election and addresses irregularities, as well as only one representative at the ballot box. They will, in essence, operate in a "reverse gestalt," for lack of better word, where the total sum of the four parties will be considerably less than their component four parts. 


--> Note here that on the national level, the 2007 Electoral Reform went the opposite direction: While e.g. PT and Convergencia extracted a huge number of "safe seats" from the PRD as a price for going into a full coalition (all votes went to the coalition, not the individual parties) in 2006, this was changed at the federal level as the smaller parties now will have to carry their own weight - they have to present their own legislative/municipal lists rather than negotiating safe seats and "vote transfers" in advance. 


* In addition, however, the legislation also aims at greatly reducing the campaign time from 72 and 60 days for governor and deputies/municipal presidents, respectively, to 45 and 30. Clearly this is directly going to favor the party that already is receiving near total permanent coverage in the media, PRI and its candidate Enrique Peña Nieto. 


* Other measures to reduce party spending as well as methods to designate party representatives at the ballot stations, both intended to favor the sitting PRI. More here later. 


PRI and PVEM voted in commitee to bring the proposed legislation up to a floor vote, and was backed in this by none other than Convergencia, a quintessentially opportunist party that rivals the PVEM in frequency of turnings its cape to the wind (the same party is, to recall, on the national level an ardent backer of Andrés Manuel López Obrador), as well as PANAL and the Partido Social Demócrata (PSD) (the latter is now-defunct on the national level, and its representative in Mexico State is a PRI member in all but name). 


Peña Nieto, in his usual slick doublespeak, claimed he and the PRI were not against alliances at all:

 "What the PRI want is rather to promote a legal framework that permits transparent political competition, and that doesn't create confusion."

Beyond such niceties, this initative is far from aimed at ending confusion, but directly to seek to block a common PRD-PAN candidate in 2011, as well as other measures intended to directly favor the PRI candidate.

Now PRI/PVEM and its backers claims that such amalgams represent a more clear option than common candidacies, where parties run on their own separate labels and lists yet combine to put forth e.g. a common gubernatorial candidate.  The argument does not hold water even in a cursory reading.

PRI/PVEM are using the case of Guanajuato as a precedent; there, the local congress voted to ban common candidacies, which was appealed unsuccesfully to the Supreme Court. Yet the comparison is a spurious one, for a range of reasons, most importantly as it didn't apply to gubernatorial candidates, but municipal-level offices.

Luis Sánchez Jiménez, leader of the Mexico State branch of PRD and one of the most capable of PRD's cadres, deemed Peña Nieto "a danger to democracy and to the country." It is certainly a clear demonstration of the lengths of institutional engineering to which Peña Nieta is willing to go to reach the Mexican presidency.  PRD president Jesús Ortega gets the final word:

"Peña Nieto is on several fronts doing everything possible to prevent the alliance. He knows the risk of a democratic union that can beat him and the PRI in elections in the State of Mexico, and this will be a mortal blow, not only toward his pretensions to be President of the Republic, but a mortal blow to the person who appears today as the candidate of the oligarchy."

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.