Ricardo Pascoe Pierce
Recent gains by the opposition have entirely changed the prognosis for next year’s elections. The story of how this change has happened is for future analysis. But today, it is necessary to remember some of its ingredients because they are still active and will influence the decisions to be made in the coming months.
Political parties, as entities of public interest, are a relatively late appearance on the scene in the country’s political life. They began intervening in electoral processes with a certain degree of competitiveness in 1988. Before that, they existed formally but were sounding boards for specific group interests. They only became relevant when they began to win elections, govern municipalities or states, influence legislative processes, and, finally, win the Presidency to govern the country.
The electoral reforms that allowed political parties to compete with a certain degree of fairness were approved in the 1990s. From then on, a new political class connected to the parties appeared in the country. Mayors from all parties began to manage budgets, lobbying with the new state and federal deputies. This democratic phenomenon of power management also led to the decentralization of decision-making. Centralism lost power, and the new power brokers were the members of the political parties.
Since the political parties received the citizens’ votes, they were supposed to be faithful interpreters of the spirit of the citizenry and their needs. But the nascent democracy in Mexico suffered severe reproach and, consequently, was discredited by society because the parties decided their proposals and political positions internally, attending to the interests of the internal groups of the political organizations without necessarily being faithful interpreters of the citizens’ aspirations.
In the first decade of the 21st Century, a divorce between political parties and society, in general, was cemented. The discredit of public policies and of democracy itself generated a conflict of credibility in the overall functioning of the decision-making system in Mexico.
Citizen groups began to organize themselves outside the political parties to deliberate on the national reality. Some to work on issues of specific concern: environment, human rights, mistreatment of women, protection of children, protection of animals, violence, organized crime, education, health, prison conditions, the justice system, and the rule of law, among others. Suddenly the new Mexico of citizen organizations emerged.
And the media began to expand their vision of what was happening in Mexico. Social networks, blogs, and virtual newspapers started seriously influencing the national conversation. These media do not necessarily focus on the debate of officialdom and political parties but go much further, touching on the issues that interest society without letting themselves be trapped by exclusively official narratives. In this context of social activism, think tanks also emerged, seeking to have a direct impact on public policies, the fight against corruption, and the strengthening of democracy and its institutionality in the country.
In this stage of the development of civil society organizations, it was confirmed that the separation between their tasks and those of the political class was, except in a few cases, a total divorce.
The good thing about the 4T government is that it has brought about a strategic rapprochement between civil society organizations and opposition political parties. And society has demanded that political parties conduct themselves differently, open up to a richer and more diverse deliberation, and change their working methods, for the good of all.
The first experience of this approach occurred during the mid-term elections of 2021. The citizenry organized in Sí Por México to demand that the opposition parties unite on a common front. The parties resisted, notably the PAN and PRI because this proposal undermined their ideological platforms and internal statutes. And this was true. But finally, the logic of the citizens prevailed: unity was indispensable if the objective was to defeat López Obrador’s authoritarian drift.
As did the PRI, the PAN had to hold a national caucus of its leadership to approve unity. The PRD always agreed with the unity of the three parties. But they had to abide by the pressure of society and modify their internal decisions to achieve unity. In the 2021 elections, the unity of these three parties obtained enough votes to change the correlation of forces in the Federal Congress, preventing or hindering the anti-democratic impositions of Morena.
From that experience, citizen organizations multiplied and expanded their membership exponentially. Citizens had perceived their capacity to influence decision-making in the opposition, regardless of whether political parties were the ones legally registered to register candidates. The new central issue under debate was choosing the opposition candidates, starting with the presidential candidacy.
PAN and PRI stepped forward and divided the candidacies, as they had become accustomed to doing. The PRI would nominate the gubernatorial candidacy in the State of Mexico, while the PAN would define the two central candidacies: Presidency and Head of Government in Mexico City. This decision did not satisfy the citizens for being exclusionary and bureaucratic.
The uproar began around the proposal of primaries as the best method to define the candidacies of the opposition, looking for a method that contrasted with Morena’s dedazo (imposition). Although PAN and PRI opposed the primaries, the political context forced them to accept the proposal, which is the method applied today by the new Frente Unido Por México. Both parties were forced to change statutes to accommodate this new method of electing opposition candidates.
Even today, there is still resistance to the primary method, as in the case of Mexico City. The PAN, in particular, has refused to accept the primary process. But eventually, it will have to agree to a method similar to the national one because that is what society demands.
This is how the opposition is doing in Mexico today, making way for new political actors, new ways of doing politics, and new methods for defining their candidacies. All this process makes the opposition a genuinely competitive force with the capacity to win the elections next year.
After the 2024 elections, the task will be to include in the national electoral legislation the obligation for all parties to elect their candidates in primaries. This will affirm the direct contribution of the citizenry in the defense of democracy in Mexico.
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