Anger reigned in the meeting room where Marcelo Ebrard met with his team on Wednesday afternoon. He first gave an explosive press conference, where he asked, hours before the final result was known, that the polling process be repeated to elect the presidential candidate of the National Regeneration Movement (Morena). Then he held a closed-door meeting with his collaborators, in which he explained the reasons why he would no longer participate in the process or attend the event where the winner of the internship will be officially announced. In the private meeting, to which EL PAÍS had access, the former foreign minister opened the door when he left the party, a scenario that sources from his team confirmed to this newspaper. “We are not going to submit to that lady,” he said about Claudia Sheinbaum, to the applause of her followers, who yelled “president, president.” Ebrard also put on the table the break with the party leadership, headed by Mario Delgado. “We are not going to tolerate a leadership that does this to us,” he said.
The ex-chancellor’s anger was latent. On Wednesday afternoon, his team came out first to denounce irregularities in the polls. These were not incidents of a single day, but problems registered throughout the entire process, they assured at a press conference. Later he came out himself to speak. He accused the leadership of “forcibly preventing” his team from entering the building where the official count of Morena was taking place and the police of beating his representative to the party, Senator Malú Mícher . In the private meeting, in which it was not allowed to record or have cell phones on, Ebrard regretted what had happened, hugged Mícher, whom he recognized for the work done, and said that he could not believe what was happening. “They are saying that if I am going to break up with Morena, but I did not break anything, it was them,” he said, clearly annoyed. With information from Zedryk Raziel.
The biggest anger was taken by Delgado, the national president of Morena. “He was my collaborator, do you remember?” said the former foreign secretary of Andrés Manuel López Obrador. Delgado took his first strong steps on the political scene at the hands of Ebrard, in the Government of Mexico City, between 2006 and 2012, years in which he first held the position of head of the Ministry of Finance, and then was in charge of the capital’s Secretary of Education.
Ebrard explained in the private meeting, in which his wife, Rosalinda Bueso, was also present, that he was not going to accept consolation prizes if they were offered to him, nor a senatorial position or any other position. The former chancellor said that they were going to have to explain to the people what had happened with these polls, that the process would have been cleaner if Delgado and the party leadership accepted the errors and failures that had been committed in carrying them out, “and let to say that everything is perfect”. For this reason, Ebrard maintained that it was best to run the process again, now in a more neat way. The presidential candidate, who canceled his participation in the rest of Morena’s agenda this Wednesday, summoned his team to a meeting for next Monday in order to define the course that his aspirations will take in the future.
Ebrard began his political career, like many of his fellow ranks today, in the Institutional Revolutionary Party (PRI) at the beginning of the eighties. In the more than 40 years of his political career, he has walked hand in hand with López Obrador for a large part of his professional career. He was a member of the Cabinet of the current president in the then Federal District, where he held the Ministry of Social Development and Security. He later was his successor in the Government of Mexico City. When López Obrador finally reached the presidency, Ebrard took office as Foreign Secretary, where he accompanied him until a few weeks ago, when he decided to participate in the presidential internship.
It is not the first time that Ebrard has sought a presidential candidacy, he also wanted to do so in 2012, at which time he declined in favor of López Obrador, after the polls showed a greater intention to vote for the current president. That anecdote was brought up for discussion this Wednesday, in the private meeting. In that case, accepting that he had lost was the right thing to do, Ebrard said. However, he explained, in this case it has been different because the process was loaded with inconsistencies from the beginning.
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