“Second floor of the Fourth Transformation.” That was the phrase that could be read on the podium and on the platform where Luisa María Alcalde went up to give her first speech as national leader of Morena. Andrés Manuel López Obrador’s Secretary of the Interior arrives at a party that has become an electoral machine: with the presidency, a qualified majority in the Chamber of Deputies and the Senate, 24 governorships and 27 of the 32 local Congresses, as well as a controversial reform that will allow the movement to reconfigure the Judiciary. She also assumes the leadership at a critical moment for the party, days before the president retires from politics and Claudia Sheinbaum is sworn in as Mexico’s first female president. With López Obrador out of sight and under the leadership of Sheinbaum, Alcalde, 37, is tasked with consolidating political hegemony and the official political project, supporting the generational change and taking the reins of a movement that contains within itself its main opposition and greatest political challenges.
“I will not fail you, because I know the facts, the struggles, the risks, the sorrows and the joys of the national regeneration movement since its foundation,” promised Mayor, after being unanimously appointed. Identified with the so-called political group of the cigars And with a profile more in line with the militant base than her predecessor, Mario Delgado, the new leader assumes the position after a meteoric rise under López Obrador, who appointed her to head two portfolios during his term: the Ministry of Labor (2018-2023) and the Ministry of the Interior (2023-2024), the equivalent of the Ministry of the Interior in other countries and the president’s most important political dialogue arm in Mexico. She was the youngest to assume that position.
“How do we remain loyal to our principles? How do we not distance ourselves from the people or lose our mystique, or fall prey to pride? How do we take advantage of our diversity to build unity and not sectarianism? How do we ensure that our governments know what it means, in the deepest sense, to be part of Morena?” asked Alcalde in his acceptance speech, regarding the challenges facing the party after a “vertiginous” rise. “The essence of Morena is in its roots,” he said to answer the rhetorical questions and to “think about the Morena of the next election and the next generation.”
Alcalde is also a founder of the party and was a deputy for Movimiento Ciudadano, now in opposition, when the party was in the process of obtaining its political registration. Her mother, the accountant Bertha Luján, is one of López Obrador’s most trusted officials. She was part of his government in Mexico City, was general secretary of the party from 2012 to 2015 and secretary of the Political Council from 2015 to 2022. Her father, Arturo Alcalde, is a well-known labor lawyer, trained in the union struggle. Her sister, Bertha Alcalde, was in the president’s mix to be an advisor to the National Electoral Institute (INE) and to be a minister of the Supreme Court, but her arrival at both organizations was frustrated.
His appointment to head Morena received as much attention as the arrival of Andrés López Beltrán, one of the president’s four children, to the party’s Secretary of Organization, key to defining the party’s electoral strategy. Andy, as he is known, is a political scientist and has been an important political operator within the movement, but he made the leap in his party career irremediably under the shadow of his father, an omnipresent figure in Mexican politics and the president with the highest approval ratings of the democratic era, above 70%. The appointment of both is not exempt from controversy, under the idea that a new “dynasty” was being born within the ruling party, in the midst of an internal contest without opposition or competition and a new promotion decreed from the National Palace, the seat of government. The appointments were an open secret for two months and did not cause any major surprises.
Many of the doubts surrounding Alcalde are the same ones that hover over Sheinbaum, the first woman to come to power. The ruling party has for years imagined its future without López Obrador, the moral leader of the movement and the figure where all internal divergences and conflicts end. Sheinbaum will be the most powerful president in decades in Mexico: none of her predecessors came to power with a supermajority in both chambers and her critics and detractors warn of an authoritarian turn due to the concentration of power and the current distribution of forces in Mexico. The president has focused on capitalizing on each day he has left until the change in the presidency, next October 1, and has promoted a battery of 18 proposals for constitutional reforms to mark the path he hopes he will follow. The tight balance of the ruling party in Mexico is settled under the motto “continuity with change”: continuing with the López Obrador project, but under new leadership and a new political style.
Some analysts interpret the appointment of the Mayor, a pawn of the current Government, as another move by López Obrador to constrain Sheinbaum and condition her first steps as president. There is talk of a shift to the left so that the successor, with a more moderate and technical profile on paper, can stay the course. The truth is that the interests of the new president and her predecessor are, for the moment, aligned. From Morena they insist that it is the same architectural project: López Obrador laid the foundations, Sheinbaum will build the second floor. And more importantly: Sheinbaum has not started her term. No one can say with certainty how much will be continuity and how much, change.
A couple of hours before the appointment, Sheinbaum gave her last speech to Morena’s militants to outline the roadmap for the next leadership with a set of principles. The president-elect announced that they will follow some guidelines already drawn up by López Obrador. The party will continue to use polls as a method of selecting candidates and “raffles” to choose plurinominal candidacies, which allow the beneficiaries to reach positions without appearing on the ballot or campaigning. She will also maintain the “people” as the central figure of her project, under the slogan “the poor first” and the principle of “republican austerity”, with the argument that “there cannot be a rich government with poor people.”
But it was not all business as usual. Sheinbaum made it clear that she was the one who now held the baton of command. She announced, for example, that the leadership should not sin with “pragmatism,” the hallmark of the house during the administration of Mario Delgado, who closed alliances with several politicians of the “old regime” to increase the list of electoral victories of the party and increase the coalition of the ruling bloc to have greater governance.
The president-elect also asked “not to be a state party” or fall into “bureaucracy,” aware that the traditional parties are on the ropes and in response to those who anticipate not only a change of government, but also a new regime. She also spoke of machismo, of promoting science, of opening spaces for education, of expanding social policy: the promises of change. And there was one word that was at the top of her decalogue: “unity.” Sheinbaum suggests that a key part of the success or failure of her presidency is to avoid fractures or internal dissent that undermine the hegemony that has been built in recent years. As part of the succession devised by López Obrador, all his rivals for the presidential candidacy received “consolation prizes”: Marcelo Ebrard will be Secretary of Economy, Adán Augusto López is the coordinator in the Senate, Gerardo Fernández Noroña assumed the role of President of the Upper House and Ricardo Monreal became leader of the pro-government deputies. Mario Delgado and Citlalli Hernandez, the current general secretary, will join Sheinbaum’s Cabinet.
These are also the fronts open for Alcalde, who will have Carolina Rangel, a former candidate for deputy little known on the national scene, as his second in command. Andy, in addition to consolidating himself as a key operator, is also called to be a link between Sheinbaum and López Obrador. “The first stage of the Fourth Transformation concludes,” decreed the new leader, with the same heartfelt tone with which she delivered the last Government report and addressed the Chamber of Deputies for the last time to celebrate, in her words, “the best president in history.”
“The people decided for continuity and for the time of women, they decided for Claudia Sheinbaum and in Morena we cannot fail them,” he promised. The mayor said that his first task will be to define the program for what is to come: to swell the party ranks, to promote a declaration of principles for the militants and the governors, to safeguard unity, to deliberate on the future. It will be a mix between the principles that López Obrador left and the decalogue that Sheinbaum dictated, he said. The new leader presented herself as a guardian of continuity and party discipline, as the bases expect Sheinbaum to be and as the critics hope she will not be. After years of speculation, Morena will face a long-anticipated future without López Obrador, with two women at the helm and under the promise of a change of era.
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