The presidential succession each six-year period writes its own rules, but it is not without references to some previous ones. Naturally, the candidatures prefigure only two possibilities: continuity and renewal. The nomination of the Morena presidential candidate for 2024 will not be the exception.
This Friday there will be an inevitable rupture in the dominant Morenoite coalition due to the coup they are preparing against senatorial leader Ricardo Monreal Avila, under the pretext of the multi-party commission to investigate the arrest of José Manuel del Río Virgen, Monreal’s technical secretary and operator. On one side will be the twenty-nine Lopez Obrador senators and on the other, thirty-two Monrealist legislators are preparing.
The political problem is more complex: the constitutional reforms of President López Obrador –electrical, political-electoral and the transfer of the National Guard to Sedena– require a qualified majority of two thirds of the senators –67%- – and Morena’s current bench barely reaches 47.6% of the total, less than 50%.
The background of the crisis in the dominant coalition of Morena is located in the current process of designation of the presidential candidate of the party in power, until now operated publicly by the president of the republic. The designation of the candidate will be through private surveys.
The crisis in the succession reproduces in a very precise way what happened in 1987 in the PRI: the ex-governor of Michoacán Cuauhtémoc Cárdenas Solórzano asked the president of Madrid to open the nomination of the candidate to the vote of the militant base, just at the juncture of a continuity dispute between the historical PRIism of revolutionary nationalism and the neoliberal PRIism of the Free Trade Agreement.
Faced with De la Madrid’s refusal, Cárdenas chose to accept the presidential candidacy of the Authentic Party of the Mexican Revolution and competed as an independent candidate of a coalition called the National Democratic Front, with three key formations: the Mexican Communist Party, the Mexican Party of the Workers of Heberto Castillo and the democratic current of the PRI. Only through electoral fraud was the official candidate Salinas de Gortari able to get barely 50% of the vote.
As in politics there are no whims or follies but rather strategic movements, President López Obrador announced the drafting of a political will to avoid ungovernability. The national context of the testament is none other than the presidential succession and the pre-candidates will have to adjust to these conditions. Deep down, Monreal is not anti-lopezobradorista or anti-4th-T, but his complaints seek a more open competition with the three official candidates: the manager Claudia Sheinbaum, the chancellor Marcelo Ebrard and the executor Adán Augusto López Hernández.
But the tradition of presidential succession has its strict mechanisms. In 1981, in full succession, the magazine Proceso published a document that confronted the Secretary of Programming and Budget, De la Madrid, with the director of Pemex, Jorge Díaz Serrano, two pre-candidates. López Portillo’s response was to remove the advertising from the magazine with the following argument, recounted by the director of the publication himself: “Julio, you got involved in a matter and that is exclusively managed by the president of the republic.” De la Madrid fanned Cárdenas because the president could not attend to suggestions for a matter of strict presidential management.
The problem of the crisis in the Senate due to the commission to investigate abuses of power in Veracruz is much greater, because it was not just a group of monrealists, but rather it is made up of all the partisan factions in the Senate and is chaired by Movimiento Citizen. Therefore, blocking or bursting the commission would generate a major political conflict, just when the urgent constitutional reforms also need the opposition vote.
And there is another scenario of the crisis: in three years of Minister Sánchez Cordero’s vase in the Interior, all the political negotiations passed through the Senate of Monreal and the executor López Hernández is trying to return them to the area of the federal Executive
Political Photography: At the juncture of the presidential medical review, a photograph of Beatriz Gutiérrez Müller perched on a tree about a meter high appeared on the networks. Among many interpretations, one began to generate reactions: the trunk and the branch.
Policy for dummies: politics is a game of chess and not baseball.
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