The aspirants for the presidential candidacy of the Broad Front for Mexico are in the final stretch for the collection of signatures that guarantee them to continue in the fight. Contenders need at least 150,000 citizen support to advance to the next phase of the contest. The deadline expires this Tuesday, as announced by the members of the opposition alliance: the National Action Party (PAN), the Institutional Revolutionary Party (PRI) and the Democratic Revolution Party (PRD). The PAN members Xóchitl Gálvez and Santiago Creel, the PRI members Beatriz Paredes and Enrique de la Madrid, and the PRD member Silvano Aureoles assured this week that they reached the court, although the organizers of the internal process have not given official figures for the count. Others, such as the former head of government of Mexico City, Miguel Ángel Mancera, or the former governor of Tamaulipas, Francisco García Cabeza de Vaca, seem to be further away.
Xóchitl Gálvez, the favorite to win the candidacy, boasted in an interview that her team has already collected 350,000 signatures. The PAN senator, although not a member of that party, has capitalized on the media focus due to the lawsuit that she has been holding for several weeks with the president, Andrés Manuel López Obrador, and has been the candidate who has most emphasized the need to have the props. “People do not believe the president,” she said about the confrontation with the head of the Executive.
Unlike Gálvez, who has built his campaign around citizen support to offset the resistance he has encountered within the PAN, the most traditional right-wing party in Mexico, other opposition leaders have taken advantage of the structures and operators they have planted during years. Creel’s collaborators affirm that they already have 150,000 signatures and that the deputy already has his sights set on the next phases.
The opposition calendar provides for the holding of public opinion studies on the finalists from August 11 to 16. The agenda marks five meetings between August 17 and 26 with stops in Tijuana, Monterrey, León, Guadalajara and Mérida. The still president of the Board of Directors of the Chamber of Deputies plans to resign next Tuesday or Wednesday, except for some unforeseen event, sources from his team said. “In principle, enter the first forum and continue touring the country,” they say about the steps to follow. Applicants will be able to continue collecting signatures until August 20. All the support they get will be used for the primary elections, the last phase, in which only those who have registered in this first phase will be able to vote.
The national president of the PRI, Alejandro alito Moreno celebrated that Paredes and De la Madrid are close to becoming finalists and assured that they have raised more than 400,000 supports between them. “They are the best profiles of our party,” he said in a recorded message. The former PRI leader, a veteran of politics, took advantage of the networks she built over decades to meet the requirement. Her team says she has more than 300,000 signatures. The Secretary of Tourism in the Government of Enrique Peña Nieto was, on the other hand, more reserved and did not want to say if the necessary threshold has been crossed, although he was confident that he would have the support to move forward. “If I tell them I’ve already reached them, they won’t come to any event,” he said.
The applicants have the additional requirement that the signatures come from at least 17 of the 32 States of the country. The filter tested the structures of the politicians in contention and is a thermometer to measure how much support they have. It was designed to choose the most competitive profiles, although it was not without controversy. At the end of May, before the rules of the opposition presidential race were defined, PAN member Marko Cortés said that it was preferable to ask for more than a million signatures from each participant, which provoked complaints among his own partners. In the end, the number was drastically reduced a month later, when the official starting signal was given.
The platform to endorse the support collapsed, after launching in the second week of June. Technological obstacles, such as Internet access or failures in the web portal, also caused discontent among the applicants and some have justified that they have not succeeded for this reason. The lack of data on the count has also given rise to suspicions and claims of opacity. The only cash cuts have come from the participants themselves or from the leaders, such as Alito.
The consensus is that there are at least four applicants with a good chance of going through the round: Gálvez, Creel, Paredes and De la Madrid. The case of Aureoles, former governor of Michoacán, would be the most surprising, although the PRD president, Jesús Zambrano, reported on Saturday that he had achieved it. Official confirmation is still missing in all cases.
Although he says that he will pass the process without problems, Aureoles demanded that the PRD base be divided between two candidates and assured that if he had reached an agreement with Mancera, a unit application would have double the support. The former head of government is a coin in the air: he said this week that he lacks “a few signatures”, although internal sources have doubts. “We hope that Mancera, our partner, will achieve it in the remaining four days,” said Zambrano. “Mexico does not deserve to go to the disaster that the current government has plunged it into today,” he added.
Former Senator Jorge Luis Preciado, a somewhat uncomfortable profile who has denounced a “charge” in favor of Gálvez, said he had the signatures, although not all of them registered by the platform made available by the parties. Senator Lilly Téllez, for her part, dropped out of the race for not agreeing with the method for selecting the candidate and complained about the signature requirement that Cortés announced a few months ago. “I am concerned about the issue of signatures. There are characters who already have 100,000 signatures and I don’t see them on the streets looking for them,” Gálvez said on Sunday.
The Va por México coalition started the contest with 13 applicants, twice as many as the calls caps of Morena, the ruling party, which has six. The opposition has suffered from the absence of profiles with real options to compete against Marcelo Ebrard and Claudia Sheinbaum, the favorites of the ruling party. It has also battled throughout the year to prevent the fragmentation of the opposition vote, the mistrust that still reigns among the bases of each party and that the visibility of its candidates is not diluted among a dozen people who have raised their hands to lead the destinies of the Front.
Some six politicians have already abandoned the race by not registering as candidates, among them Lilly Téllez, Claudia Ruiz Massieu or José Ángel Gurría. On August 8 there will be a new screening, with a similar number of discarded profiles, in the absence of the official announcement. The closure of the signature collection stage anticipates decisive instances in the opposition’s career and possible friction promoted by those who do not pass the requirement. The candidate of Va por México, headed under the euphemism of coordinator for the Construction of the Broad Front for Mexico, will be defined on September 3, three days before that of Morena. Mexicans will go to the polls in June of next year.
subscribe here to the newsletter from EL PAÍS México and receive all the key information on current affairs in this country
#Xóchitl #Gálvez #Beatriz #Paredes #countdown #collection #signatures #opposition #presidential #race