Ricardo Pascoe Pierce
When President López Obrador leaves the Presidency of the Republic, his party-movement called Morena will tend to disappear. That instrument was not created to survive in time but was entrusted with a single objective and purpose: to achieve the presidency with and for López Obrador. Once that objective is fulfilled, its natural life will end and, therefore, it will cease to exist.
Morena does not have a reliable internal decision-making structure for any of its members. It lacks a defined ideological base, which has allowed it to agglutinate from the ultra-left to the ultra-right in a single grouping, always under the guidance and the Bonapartist decision-in-the-last-instance of López Obrador.
Besides, with so many internal decision-making bodies at odds with each other, it is preferable to make decisions by polls (that is, the presidential finger) or by raffle to take the pressure off the militant rank and file increasingly disillusioned with his promise of a bright future. In other words, it is a dysfunctional party. But it is what its leader wanted and needed: something that would support him blindly and without question or hesitation.
How it will cease to exist is naturally open to speculation. On what terms it might disappear or be transformed, either into another party or fragment into two or three parties, will be a matter of its mutation, depending on the internal conditions and its correlation of forces.
The electoral result of 2024 and the balance that it will leave to Morena in terms of its political strength will define this foreshadowed decline. If Morena retains the presidency, it will be without much internal consensus, very weakened, and without control of the Senate and the Chamber of Deputies, contrary to what happened with López Obrador.
Ricardo Monreal’s statement is correct: having brought forward the succession in Morena simply started an internal civil war, has weakened the President himself, and created the conditions for internal dissent to grow out of control, opening fissures with clear signs of rupture.
At this early stage, it is evident that the presidential candidacy of Morena to be defined by López Obrador will not have the support of his “opponents.” The disarray, the favoritism, and the lack of internal political cohesion of the government and its official party are the perfect ingredients for an internal rupture. And it prefigures the announcement, also premature, of the end of Morena as we know it today.
As the decomposition and internal disintegration of the party advances, something called Morena could continue to exist. Still, it will be a mimicry of what today shelters the President. Most likely, there will be an internal nuclear war to define who will keep the legal registration of the party: conservatives, liberals, reformists, centrists, or revolutionaries. The coin will be flying through the air for the duration of the war.
Essentially, Morena will cease to exist for functional purposes once López Obrador’s six-year term ends. What will follow will be a time of conflict, in that party and the country, a common denominator in everything López Obrador does.
For all these reasons, it is possible to conclude that Morena is a party whose existence will last only one six-year term. Afterward, chaos will follow.
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