Ricardo Pascoe Pierce
The opposition must transform its coalition in form and substance to compete united in 2024. This effort involves constituting a new, broader, and more inclusive agreement than what has been achieved. Before defining its presidential candidacy, the opposition must agree on constructing new and more consistent commitments and joint work methods.
This means rethinking the opposition coalition to make room for the many social, intellectual and political energies that, dispersed, may dissipate, but together they will succeed in transforming the country.
In recent years, Mexican culture has been transformed, with the impulse of many citizen initiatives, all aimed at the task of rescuing the country from authoritarianism and giving it a new direction towards democracy. Va Por México, which courageously dared to point out the path to follow in 2021, must now be ready to create a different, broader, and more inclusive umbrella capable of gathering the novelties of Mexican society: new energies and new organizations. The conditions exist to build a great Democratic Convergence.
The challenge is of a historical dimension, without exaggeration. For this reason, the opposition has the enormous responsibility to take a break, take the time to rethink, and act daringly and decisively.
The social and political opposition has grown in organization and strength in the last two years. The election results of 2021 proved this fact. However, it continues to be a dispersed force, with lights and shadows. Citizens without a party are organizing as never before. From the first hints of plural, non-partisan organizations, they are expanding throughout the national territory in number, strength, and representativeness. Citizens are losing their fear of expressing their opposition to the authorities’ increasingly imposing and arbitrary behavior. Even so, there is a great dispersion of efforts.
Opposition parties have advanced their unitary practices with remarkable maturity without considering their known ideological and historical differences. But different circumstances and evaluations of specific situations, as reflected in the Constitutional Moratorium, have prevented them from achieving the broad and forceful unity required to face the crossroads between authoritarianism and democracy.
The coalition Va Por México, formed by PAN, PRI, and PRD, has represented a historical rearrangement of the political blocs in the country. However, as the political clock ticks and the federal government becomes increasingly aggressive against the opposition in general, it is evident that today it is necessary to create a new opposition engineering. For example, how to give Movimiento Ciudadano its place and representativeness in the new political equation? Or how to give place, participation, and recognition to the civil society organizations actively participating in the significant decisions to be taken in the future? And how to include influential sectors, although not politically organized but no less important for that reason, such as intellectuals, academics, health workers, educators, workers, peasants, and native peoples? And how to include Catholics, Jews, and Christians in the call? The primary task of the opposition is to turn the inclusion of all these individual and collective actors into key pieces to boost an overwhelmingly powerful force that will be able to defeat authoritarianism in 2024.
The invincibility of the opposition force is a social state of mind that can be fostered and consolidated. To achieve this state of mind, the opposition must act, and soon. At this moment, the most important thing is to organize this great plural space. Then will come the definition of who will head the presidential candidacy.
The challenge for the opposition is to find the route for this integration and that it is also functional in its decision-making. Then it will be possible to set out on the path to define the most convenient candidacies that will ensure the continuity of the democratic and free Mexico we aspire to.
Great dangers lie ahead for Mexico’s fragile democracy. Situational phenomena dictate signs of adversity on the road to the 2023 state elections in the State of Mexico and Coahuila and towards the mega-election of 2024. López Obrador’s government has already revealed its plan to operate fully-fledged State elections. Not only does he intend to resort to the unlimited use of public resources, both economic and material and human, to achieve his goal of winning the State of Mexico next year and retaining, albeit by force, the Presidency in 2024. He has also shown a willingness to use weapons to stay in power if he deems it necessary. Both constitutional and illegal weapons.
The recent elections, both 2021 and 2022, have experienced the presence of open intimidation by organized crime to support Morena’s candidacies. And the population obviously feels threatened when they perceive the complicity of the President of the Republic with “Mr. Loera Guzman”. And the threat is doubled when the people perceive that soldiers, marines, and national guards obey the instruction not to confront, or even inhibit, the actions of organized crime in the country.
The elections of 2023 and, especially those of 2024, will confront the country with a crossroads with no way out. If Morena wins, the government will follow the path of institutional destruction to become prey to a single ideology and single thinking, the progressive elimination of political and social freedoms, including the press, and the decoupling of our economy from that of North America (necessarily abandoning the USMCA This is not a “catastrophist” projection. It would simply be the logical consequence of the path initiated, as of now, by López Obrador.
Faced with this path, the opposition must act united in defense of the Constitution, and individual and collective freedoms, including the press, to preserve democracy. This institutional framework ensures plurality and tolerance as a foundation of the new society and the global market economy offered by our strategic association, via USMCA, with the North American regional bloc.
Our limits of action and organization are not the currently existing structures. The willingness to create higher, flexible, and increasingly unitary, pluralistic, and democratic bodies are necessary to open the way to victory in 2024. To continue living in a constitutional republic.
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