Is it weird that a left-wing party and a right-wing party are planning to run a common candidate for the Mexican presidency? Of course.

Margarita Zavala was gathering signatures in Coyoacán recently when a woman she was chatting with introduced her female partner and two children. 

      

To her credit, the former first lady and federal lawmaker didn’t assume a politician's posture at this unexpected revelation. Instead, she wigged out.

Frantically waving off the video-recorder (there’s always a video-recorder), she blurted to nobody in particular that she could never be seen on video with a non-traditional family because she firmly believes that marriage is only for a man and a woman.

So do most people in the PAN, the right-wing party she was associated with until a few months ago. But most of them aren’t going to have such a conniption at the very idea of being seen with a same-sex family. More likely, being politicians, they’ll want to keep the cameras on as they try to make homophobia sound respectable. 

Zavala’s panic attack showed just how conservative Mexican conservatives can be. She’s married to Felipe Calderón, president during the second half of the nation’s 12-year delusion that replacing the PRI with the PAN would sanitize the government. His policies were hardline anti-choice, soft on church-state separation, and hardly gay-friendly.

Compare that with the PRD, the left-of-center opposition party. In control of Mexico City for most of its existence, the PRD has legalized abortion, relaxed marijuana prohibition, established gender equality as policy, and actively promoted LGBT rights.

In short, the left-right divide on social issues is alive and well in Mexico. Should be interesting to see how these two diametrically opposed parties go at each other during the upcoming presidential campaign.

Interesting indeed. What’s actually happening is this:  The PRD and PAN, with nothing in common, have joined forces in what they call a Broad Front. Counterintuitive as it may be, they plan to run a common candidate for president, and presumably divvy up the posts and power if they win. 

The candidate could be Miguel Ángel Mancera, who runs Mexico City for the PRD (though not really a member of the party). It could be Ricardo Anaya, the PAN’s party leader. Or it could be somebody else. Whoever it is, half the Front is going to have to support someone they’re usually against. 

Why would they do such a thing? Practicality, mainly. The PAN will have a hard time winning this race on its own. The PRD has no chance at all. Replaced by Andrés Manuel López Obrador’s Morena as the flagship party of the left, the PRD is pretty much reduced to attaching itself to a larger party, as the PVEM (the faux Green Party) has to the PRI. 

El Financiero, a business daily, published a poll this week that pretty much tells the story. If Mancera and Anaya run separately with their parties, they get 9 percent and 15 percent respectively, well behind the PRI’s 25 percent and Morena’s 30 percent. If either runs as the Front candidate, he gets 20 percent. Still behind, but in the hunt.

But how, you ask, can they get away with such a hypocritical ploy? In a democracy, shouldn't the left and right be competing for votes , not bundling them? Don’t these politicians stand for anything? Is their only priority getting in so they can feed at the trough?

Good questions. My reading is that what the Front sees as most important in 2018 is getting the PRI out of Los Pinos without letting AMLO in. We can argue about gay marriage and energy reform later, their thinking goes. Let’s just get the swamp drained first.

This implies that positions on the issues are not all that important. What else is new? The only real issue in Mexico is corruption — not individual cases but the entrenched culture of corruption that has rotted government, law enforcement and business. Corruption may not have caused crime, inequality and environmental degradation, but it sure makes it hard to do anything about them.

Mexican voters are understandably jaded about a national election as a means of attacking corruption. Still, it’s a chance to do something, make some kind of statement. It’s just not obvious how backing a coalition of the PAN and PRD — both far from corruption-free over the years — is supposed to help matters. Perhaps once the attention is on the candidate, rather than the machine behind him or her, the view will change.  

Then again, the whole Front idea could collapse at any time. You never know.

One thing we do know for now is that Margarita Zavala will not be the Front candidate. She was the first PAN member to announce her candidacy — and the first to bolt the party to run as an independent. That’s why she was gathering those signatures in Coyoacán.

How’s she doing? Not bad. If she ends up being the only independent candidate (a distinct possibility given the difficulty of the qualifying process) the El Financiero poll puts her in a tie with the Front for third place. Maybe the party planners have been going about this all wrong.