Ricardo Pascoe Pierce
The opportunities to unite the opposition in 2024 are disappearing as sand between the fingers. Infected by the virus of polarization, the infection of sectarianism and radicalism are beginning to replace generosity and humility in the behavior of the civil society that yearns for a solution to the tragedy that the arrival of Morenism to power has meant. Instead of uniting in a common cause, both partisan and civic oppositions tend to find reasons why the unitary justification is seen as too weak and unconvincing. It even lacks historical necessity.
This virus is motivated, it must be admitted, by the country’s general culture. Mexico lives at a stage in its history where division and confrontation have taken ascendancy over dialogue and union. Of course, the objective conditions of the country favor disunity and bitterness.
The presence of drug trafficking tolerated by the government, its violence, and contempt for the rule of law are factors of social disintegration. The violence generated by drug trafficking spreads to other pores of society, like the water that permeates walls, houses, and entire communities. Violence fertilizes polarization and dissent and justifies confrontation and individualism.
The economic crisis also feeds social and political confrontation. Factors such as inflation, shortages, and the growing hardship of Mexican families only contribute to social conflict and the temptation to disregard the rules of civilized relations between social classes. Economic informality is an invitation to never obey certain rules, among them the rules of civility.
Of course, the main instigator of the spirit of polarization, confrontation, and radicalism is the President of the Republic himself. He has turned his office into a privileged space for dividing society, seeking to define the enemies of the ideological project he is championing, considering that subordination to his postulates is necessary to be on the right side “of History”. Any other option is, according to him, wrong and perverse.
Therefore, it is not surprising to discover that polarization is part of Morena’s DNA and invades its internal behaviors as it prepares for the definition of its presidential candidacy. Divisions are accentuated and deepened. Some radicals, others neoliberals. The dispute between those who propose to radicalize public policies and those who suggest going slower foreshadows an internal civil war in that party. This is where the hatred begins.
In the opposition, there are also serious problems, as if the sectarian methods of Morena had been transferred to the political and citizen structures of groups seeking change in the country. Morena’s polarization and sectarianism seem to be transferred, with all its virulence, to the opposition forces. And allowing myself an early prognosis, it opens the possibility of preventing the unity of the opposition with a view to the presidential election of 2024.
In these times, prior to major structural adjustments in the economy, society, and politics, temperaments are overflowing, radicalizing and finding reasons to strengthen intolerant positions and making exercises of rejection and differentiation, even among their own allies.
Looking at the political parties, Morena, PRI, and PAN stand out as the ones involved in harsh and divisive internal disputes regarding their leadership, candidacies, and the political lines to be followed for the elections in the State of Mexico in 2023 and the presidential election in 2024. The internal disputes of the PRD, MC, Verde, and PT, although equally virulent, are less relevant because they are the electoral train’s bus cars.
Citizen mobilization in its multiple and diverse organizations also shows signs of suffering from the sectarianism and radicalism that today corrode the entrails of their counterparts in the parties. Hatred for the 4T and the President seem to guide their programmatic proposal. But also the open contempt for the opposition parties.
Today Alito is a prominent object of hatred for the members of citizen organizations, and the contempt for that leader is automatically transferred to his party. And tomorrow, the contempt will be for Marko Cortés, President of the PAN, and, consequently, for his party. And there is nothing good to say about the PRD, PT, Verde, and MC leaders.
In the citizen insurgency, there is the idea, obviously badly put forward, that their organizations conduct themselves with an ethical and moral superiority over the parties, with the authority that this supposedly entails, as to despise the political system as a whole. So much so that they despise the presence of the opposing political parties while at the same time claiming to call for “unity” to move the country towards a new and healthier democracy.
These ruptures between civil society, the political class, and citizen organizations of political parties are the perfect recipe for a political storm looming on Mexico’s historical horizon.
In Latin American societies where this same combination of factors has occurred, its evolution usually passes through the somber experiences of the coup d’état. Faced with the inability of civilians to agree on their rules and settle their differences, they reason in the barracks: we are called to bring order. Does it sound far-fetched?
Chile, Uruguay, Brazil, and so many other Latin American countries believed in the Armed Forces’ absolute loyalty to each nation’s Magna Carta. Until they left that loyalty behind to “save” the country from incompetent civilians. Salvador Allende swore that he had ensured military loyalty, just like López Obrador, who swears to have the absolute loyalty (read subordination) of the military forces to his “project”. Look at the history of countries where civilians of all colors and flavors demonstrated their singular inability to agree on the minimum rules that condition their practices, decisions, and political exercises.
Mexico is beginning to look too much like other countries that have gone through such bitter routes. Political parties are going through periods of crisis. It is to be hoped that they have the institutional capacity to reestablish their internal functionality and the social representativeness they hold. And as for citizen organizations, which have perfectly identifiable ideological or social seals of origin, it is desirable that they move away from the absurd presumption of some moral superiority over political parties to join all of them in a project to rescue the nation.
If this union to build an institutional scaffolding based on tolerance, dialogue and democracy is not achieved, the country is in real danger of falling apart before our eyes, like the sand that slips through our fingers.
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