Wednesday, January 24, 2018

Because you asked for it, herewith is presented a guide to Mexico's simple, straightforward presidential election, a noble exercise in citizen participation, the democratic process at its purest.

The Mexican presidential campaign may seem confusing, but it’s really quite simple. 

Except when it’s not. 

Basically, the ruling PRI will try to hold onto the presidency against several challengers. To do so, it has chosen from its ranks a low key technocrat who has filled a number of cabinet posts under President Enrique Peña Nieto. 

Except that José Antonio Meade is not from the ranks. He’s not a member of the PRI. He just works for them. So has half his potential rivals, including AMLO, Armando Ríos Piter and El Bronco.  

Meade’s outsiderdom is supposedly a plus, since voters seem set to boot out the PRI, this time after only six years instead of the seven decades it took the first time. That  2000 opposition victory is seen as the model for Regime Change 2.0.

Except that the dragon-slayer of that year, Vicente Fox, has turned coat to cheerlead for the PRI, and seems especially taken with its incumbent president. What’s more, the party he won with, the PAN, is hemorrhaging militants, including two high-rankers who in just the last few weeks defected to work with Meade’s campaign — Julio di Bella Roldán and Javier Lozano. 

From the PRI point of view, Meade’s attraction is as a distraction; his under-the-radar service theoretically inoculates him from the accumulated scandals and tragedies of Peña Nieto’s presidency. He didn’t do personal deals with government contractors. He didn’t botch the investigation of a student massacre. He never got flustered trying to name a book he’s read. His slate must be as clean as a PRI candidate’s can be. 

Except it’s not. Meade was the  architect — or at least the public face — of the single most unpopular act of the Peña Nieto sexenio. It was just about a year ago when the PRI administration ended fuel subsidies, sending gasoline prices up drastically. Whether Meade was at fault is irrelevant; he signed the document.

There’s actually not much daylight at the right side of the political spectrum between the PAN and the PRI, but the latter is usually seen as battling the PAN to its right and the PRD to its left. 

Except that the PRD has no dog in the presidential hunt this year, having entered into an odd-couple alliance with the PAN. The idea is that a united front with a mutually acceptable coalition candidate stands the best chance of removing the corrupt PRI a worthier goal than fighting stale left-right battles.

Except there is no mutually acceptable candidate. Ricardo Anaya had a lock on the nomination from the get-go, just as he would have had a lock on the nomination of an unattached PAN, which until recently he ran as party president. 
The true result of the merger was to subsume the PRD under Anaya and the PAN.

Which may not have been wise. Mexico City's PRD Mayor Miguel Ángel Mancera would probably have had more support among panistas than Anaya with the perredistas.

Except that Mancera is not really a member of the PRD. That didn’t stop him from winning and carrying out the mayor job under that party’s auspices. It would probably have been to his advantage in a presidential race.  Instead, Mancera missed his chance at using the CDMX leadership — the No. 2 elected post in the nation — as a jumping off point for a presidential run.

Except no Mexico City head of government has jumped off into the presidency, though many have tried — Manuel Camacho, Cuauhtémoc Cárdenas, Andrés Manuel López Obrador and Marcelo Ebrard among them. 

Anaya is presumably in a strong  position to duke it out with Meade for conservative, anti-AMLO support. The idea is to build up enough of a lead over Meade in the polls to convince would-be PRI voters to unite behind the PAN (excuse me, behind the Front) to keep AMLO out of Los Pinos. It’s the voto util strategy, and it worked marvelously in 2000 when Cardenás supporters flocked to Fox to defeat the PRI candidate, and in 2006 when the PRI’s Roberto Madrazo became a non-factor to help the PAN's Felipe Calderón beat AMLO. 

Except Meade’s not his only rival on the right. Margarita Zavala, another PAN heavyweight, is in the picture after she bolted the party to run as an independent. She’s already taking poll points away from Anaya, a case in point of the difference the advent of independent candidates is making.

Except the independents are not all that independent. Zavala, who served in the Senate for the PAN and was first lady during the Calderón administration (2006-2012), is as panista as they come. Her independence has more to do with Anaya’s grip on the nomination than any change of heart. Same is true for Armando Ríos Piter (who left the PRD) and El Bronco (PRI), though this last declared his independence earlier than the others.

All this leaves AMLO and Morena alone on the left, with a claim to a political purity untainted by the self-serving machinations cited above.

Except the AMLO campaign may be the most ideologically muddled of them all. 

Besides freeing himself from challenges to his leadership from petty pretenders, AMLO created Morena to clear the way for a 2018 run unassociated with the PRD’s increasingly sleazy reputation, personified, fairly or not, by images of party stalwart René Bejarano stuffing stacks of bills into a suitcase, or peering from behind bars.

Except that Bejarano and his legislator wife Dolores Padierna are visible and welcome AMLO supporters this year.

Accepting them into the new fold might be explained by their past support in 2006 and 2012 when López Obrador ran with the PRD. 

Except that AMLO has also accepted as a campaign aide the right-winger Gabriela Cuevas, a former Mexico City borough chief and federal legislator who was one of the loudest voices in favor of barring him from running for president in 2006 on legal grounds. 

By some coincidence, the PAN leadership had denied Cuevas a congressional candidacy a few days before she bolted to Morena. AMLO, who has never been a social liberal, defends the counterintuitive rapprochement on big tent grounds. After all, she’s just one person.

Except it’s not just one person. It’s an entire political party. Morena and its partner the Labor Party (PT) have welcomed into their coalition the Social Encounter Party. That may sound like a speed dating event, but it’s actually a far-right political organization run by religious extremists who have already helped pass anti-gay and anti-abortion legislation at the state level. What kind of tent is Morena using that has room for such a thing?

So it’s all quite simple, right?

Except for one more complication:

María de Jesús Patricio Martínez is another independent candidate who’s not so independent, and proudly so in her case. “I’m not an independent,” the Jalisco-born indigenous activist has said. “I’m running as the spokesperson of the Indigenous Governing Council.” Her candidacy is not so much about winning the presidency as organizing the indigenous, the working population, the marginalized and the anti-capitalist left into a movement that matters. This year, that might be a more worthwhile outcome than any one candidate’s victory. She probably won’t get the signatures to make the ballot, but if she did, I’d vote for her. 

Except as a non-citizen, I don’t have the franchise. 

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