Monday, March 24, 2008

The Mexican Left is Moving towards an Unpromising Future

By Patrick Corcoran

Historian Macario Schettino defined the recent intraparty contest to lead Mexico’s Party of the Democratic Revolution (PRD) as a chance for the left to articulate what exactly it is offering Mexico. He was writing before the results of the contest were known, but it seems safe to say that the day’s proceedings didn’t bolster Schettino’s confidence.

After some 7 million party members trudged to voting booths around the nation, exit polls from the March 16 vote showed ex-Mexico City boss (and ex-Communist) Alejandro Encinas edging out the more moderate Senator Jesús Ortega. Both sides alleged that the other’s fraud lowered their vote total, and the official result won’t be declared until March 23, after the votes are counted manually.

The climate on Election Day was, to put it mildly, disturbing. The voting was marred by squabbles between different factions and allegations of sticky-fingered high jinks. A fistfight broke out at a Mexico City polling station, and the voting was suspended in a handful of states. In the worst tradition of Mexico’s authoritarian past, allegations of ballot-burning and vote-buying abound. The PRD official charged with monitoring the process, Senator Arturo Núñez, labeled the chaotic environment an “embarrassment.”

This is in stark contrast to the heated but largely clean contests that lifted Beatriz Paredes and Germán Martínez to the presidencies of the Institutional Revolutionary Party (PRI) and the National Action Party (PAN), respectively. Someone comparing the three parties on the basis of their internal elections could be forgiven for thinking the party of the Mexican left would be the least likely to lead a clean federal government. The PRD needs to foster the popular image of a modern, democratic left to succeed, but this election was a giant step in the wrong direction.

So is the presumed winner.

Encinas’ ties with the man most responsible for ruining the image of the democratic left, Andrés Manuel López Obrador, are deeply worrying, most of all in regard to his party’s future prospects. The PRD has gone from 23 percent voter identification in 2006 to around 11 percent today. After receiving 35 percent of the vote in 2006, a year later only 18 percent of Mexicans said they would vote for López Obrador again, thanks to his shameful behavior following his narrow loss. The aftermath of the 2006 election was a nightmare most Mexicans seemed ready to wake up from, but López Obrador’s party just awarded him several more years in the spotlight, and paved his way toward another candidacy in 2012.

Lest one think that López Obrador’s decline in popularity has chastened his more anti-democratic instincts, just last week he was threatening a human cordon around the congressional building to prevent the eventual debate of an energy reform. This mindset is a cancer that the PRD must decisively reject: rather than openly debate and risk losing, we’ll deny the opposition’s legitimacy at every turn while working to physically prevent their presence.

Mexico needs the PRD. A presidential system works best with two broad forces on each side of the ideological spectrum. The PAN already has the right occupied, but on the left there’s a vacuum. The PRI seems unwilling to tack hard left, instead floating around an amorphous center. With its continued embrace of López Obrador, the PRD seems intent on convincing the less ideological masses that it isn’t ready for prime time.

This is bad news for all of Mexico, even the PRD’s ideological adversaries. Without a legitimate opposition, the PAN is easier to demonize. A moderate PRD (or a more leftist PRI) would temper the party’s more extremist conservative elements.

It hardly bears mentioning that the most successful leftist politicians in Latin Americans have been business-friendly moderates, not populist fire-breathers. (It’s the triumph of Alan García circa 2006 over the 1980s vintage.)

In Mexico there is even less tolerance for the hysterical left. When López Obrador took over the Paseo de la Reforma, when he cried “To hell with the institutions,” when he plastered signs screaming “No to the [expletive] fraud!” all over México City, his potential as a Mexican leader moved from the present to the past tense. The sooner the left recognizes this, and rejects him and his cronies, the better.

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Patrick Corcoran, a MexiData.info columnist, is a writer who resides in Torreón, Coahuila.