Potemkin Rally

The surface streets separating the Plateros sports complex from the Periférico freeway in Mexico City’s Álvaro Obregon borough were close to impassable one day last week as thousands of Democratic Revolution Party supporters paraded between jammed sidewalks and parked buses toward the park entrance.

They were mostly young, mostly male and mostly working class. Not a lot of man buns. They carried yellow and black PRD banners, but didn’t wave them. Their collective mood seemed more dutiful than eager — not downbeat, but less enthusiastic than you might expect at the first Mexico City mass rally for their presidential candidate.

Maybe that’s because the candidate they’d soon be told to cheer for, Ricardo Anaya, presided until recently over the National Action Party, exactly the kind of right-leaning, Church-cozy, business-serving, neoliberalism advocates the PRD was formed to oppose.

Then again, a significant percentage of them wasn’t there so much from dedication as from the free transportation (and possibly other inducements) offered in exchange for attendance.

Or could it be they were just a tad woozy from fumes? The flags they bore smelled like the letters and logo were imprinted not more than an hour ago with an especially potent ink.

The rally in the sports complex was in support of the political front put together for the July 1 national elections by the PAN and the PRD (it also includes the smaller Citizens Movement or MC). After a couple of stabs at a name, the coalition registered officially as “For Mexico to the Front,” which sounds almost as awkward in the original Spanish — Por México al Frente. With apologies to the coalition’s untethered marketeers, we’ll use “the Front” in this space throughout the campaign. 

The PAN may be first among equals in the Front, but the event’s optics were pure PRD. From where I stood — on a remote canvas-covered concrete basketball court, on and around which thousands were sitting, standing or milling — the only PAN logos in sight were at the main stage, literally a soccer field away, visible on video screens. 

Easily outnumbering PAN and MC symbols were the local Álvaro Obregón banners. With a population of more than 750,000, Álvaro Obregón is the third largest and perhaps most diverse of Mexico City’s 16 delegaciones, which are semi-autonomous administrative entities roughly equivalent to — or at least reminiscent of —  New York City’s boroughs or the arrondisements of Paris. 

As host, the borough earned microphone time. Its government head, the delegada María Antonieta Hidalgo Torres, was right there on stage, smiling broadly when the camera looked her way, but it was the former borough chief  Leonel Luna who spoke. 

That’s because Luna, now a force in Mexico City’s Legislative Assembly, controls the massive political organization that has kept Álvaro Obregón in PRD hands since 2003. It was his minions who saw to it that the huge outdoor athletic complex was filled with thousands of nominally left-wing PRD supporters willing to cheer on command for a more-than-nominally right-wing presidential candidate.

Whatever skills account for Luna’s political success, they’re not oratorical. Still, as he droned, the local case for the coalition was on display. 

Álvaro Obregón’s sprawl contains mostly working class and marginalized neighborhoods, but there are upscale pockets such as San Ángel and Pedregal in the south and the residential towers of Santa Fe in the west that lean toward the conservative PAN. There’s never been enough of those PAN votes to threaten the PRD’s hold on the borough, but if those voted shift to the PRD on July 1 as a result of the coalition, they may be enough to offset the bite that Morena — Andrés Manuel López Obrador’s schismatic party that is now Mexico’s main political force on the left — will surely take out of the PRD’s traditional support in Álvaro Obregón.

The same goes for the Mexico City mayor’s race. By what was surely an arrangement, the PRD got one of its own as the Front’s CDMX candidate, Alejandra Barrales, in exchange for ceding the presidential candidacy to the PAN. Barrales, a recent PRD party president, is a more dynamic speaker than Luna, or at least louder. She’s popular among the faithful, and on this day woke things up a little. 

Indeed, some 10 minutes into her talk, there was a noticeable stirring among the gathering in our area, with some rising from their folding chairs and waving their arms. It turned out that the popcorn vendors had finally arrived, the first food that those attendees who hadn’t stocked up at the Walmart next door had seen in hours. 

Barrales addressed the issues only by mentioning them. Insecurity, corruption, inequality, pollution, traffic — if you don’t like those things, vote for the Front and we’ll make them go away. This standard approach to campaigning would probably work better for the PRD candidate if her own party hadn’t been governing the city for the entire 21st century.

Barrales (that's her on the left) is already polling behind the Morena candidate, Claudia Sheinbaum, who was Mexico City’s environment secretary when López Obrador ran the city from 2000 to 2005, in his and her PRD days. Hence Barrales is going to need all the PAN votes she can get. That, after all, is what the Front is for.

So she allotted as much time to promoting Anaya in her speech as she spent on herself. He later did the same for her. The PAN and PRD have joined forces before in some entities, but gushing mutual admiration at this level was unthinkable before now.

Both candidates seemed intent on convincing their respective party loyalists of the synergistic benefits of the PRD-PAN merger. And not just because of electoral math. They each mentioned, for example, that with the Front running both the nation and Mexico City, the capital will get a lot more love (read funds) from the feds than the previous PAN and the current PRI administrations have been willing to send to an opposition bastion. 

Of course, the same applies if there is a Morena president (López Obrador) and Morena mayor (Sheinbaum), but that wasn’t mentioned.

I tried to make my way through an obstacle course of poles, ropes, fences, hidden holes and unbudging people to the main stage area to see Anaya live. No go. I didn’t have a press pass, and the VIP section was impenetrable. All I’d accomplished was a change of video screens.

Anaya himself had no such trouble. A long path had been cordoned off for him so he and his people could make their way to the stage area in the manner of a Mike Tyson entourage. Upon his arrival, the crowd was told to cheer and shout “Ricardo! Ricardo!” Many did.

Unlike Tyson, Anaya is slight and bespectacled. He’s also very young — still on the good side of 40. He wears a permanent half-smile that makes him look almost meek. So it’s surprising at first that he comes on so strong when he starts talking. It shouldn’t be; meek doesn’t get you a presidential nomination.

In his speech, Anaya mostly went after the PRI, the incumbent party that returned to the presidential residence of Los Pinos in 2012 after its seven-decade grip was ended by the PAN itself in 2000 (when Anaya was a lad of 21). This approach makes sense; just about everybody is down on the PRI these days. Its former fair-haired boy, Enrique Peña Nieto, has presided over six years of national malaise bordering on agony. What better target?

At one point, Anaya asked a señora in the audience what she thought of the Mexican economy under the PRI. For somebody we were meant to believe was chosen at random, she was remarkably prepared for the question: “I’m Florinda Arvizu and I say the economy is de la chingada.” She meant that the economy sucks. And she said it in words that Anaya wouldn’t want to use in public himself, but he still got credit for their impact. Nice maneuver. 

The thing is, though, that the PRI candidate, José Antonio Meade, is not the major obstacle between Anaya and the presidency. The Front is ahead of Meade in most (not all) recent polls, thanks mainly to the latter’s failure to excite anybody. At the same time, Anaya trails Morena’s López Obrador badly.

Still, his only attack on AMLO was almost an aside, and didn’t mention his name. We shouldn’t be fooled by a charlatan, Anaya said. Beware the kind of politician who prefers second decks on the Periférico to investing in mass transit. 

Presumably his people will come up with stronger condemnations of his chief rival than that. When they do, we can be sure it won’t be pretty. But for now, Anaya is sticking with the strategy of eliminating Meade as a credible candidate in order to woo Meade’s supporters for the end game against AMLO.

I wasn’t the only one who tried to head out before the candidate was finished speaking, looking to beat the foot traffic, so to speak. The event organizers saw that coming and blocked the long path out with masses of loyalists and their yellow flags. We tried alternative routes, similarly blocked. We were like Dorothy and her friends trying to escape the witch's castle.¡

Our salvation was a partly opened gate in a chain-link fence, its gap wide enough for one person at a time. By the time I squeezed through and negotiated an uneven terrain to emerge in no-man's land behind the complex, farther from the main entrance than where I had started, the event had ended and the streets outside were more jammed with humans than the courts and fields inside.

I felt like I had witnessed a pep rally before the big game against State U, with cheerleaders working the crowd and unending chants of “We’re going to win.” To be sure, that’s hardly unheard of in political campaigns, but in this case the overt manipulation by the leaders and the insincerity of the led challenged one’s faith in electoral democracy.

From the Front’s point of view, however, the event’s prevailing image is just what they want to project — thousands of PRD supporters, clearly identifiable by their yellow flags, cheering loudly and visibly for a PAN candidate for president. That’s the kind of tableau they’re counting on. That’s how previously unavailable votes are accessed. That’s what a coalition — a Front — is all about.