Mexico has put a stop to the extreme right even before the elections were held. Following in the wake of the northern neighbors who voted for Trump or the success of Bolsonaro in Brazil and the most recent of Milei in Argentina, a candidate against abortion and in favor of the traditional family, Eduardo Verástegui, has tried to present himself as an independent for the presidential elections in June of this year, but has not obtained the sufficient signatures imposed by the country's tortuous electoral bureaucracy. In Mexico, the extreme right hits a powerful ice wall for historical and current reasons: the political stability that the perfect dictatorship of the PRI built for years does not leave much room for adventures on the margins; These days, the country is also experiencing an economic solidity that conjures up great social revolts, generous fishing grounds for radical initiatives.
Social networks and their contagious proclamations bring the population closer to any crazy idea that crosses their path, but in Mexico they do not reach the seat that the extreme right seeks because there are several reasons that work against them. These days, the electoral system is designated as the main limit, which forces an independent candidate to collect signatures equivalent to 1% of citizens with the right to vote, which means close to one million, which also have to be distributed equally among 17 States, a major challenge for a candidate without partisan infrastructure. Setting up a party is even more cumbersome and can only be done the year following the elections. So Eduardo Verástegui, a handsome soap opera actor converted into a politician, barely gathered 14% of the expected support and will have to wait for better fortune.
The question, however, remains pertinent: why in Mexico doesn't the extreme right catch on as is happening in half the world? This North American country has always played against the grain of its surrounding politics. When dictatorships emanating from coups d'état or hopeful revolutions triumphed in Latin America, Mexicans swam anesthetized in the warm magma of the Institutional Revolutionary Party (PRI), which did not allow other adventures. Everyone fit into the PRI: “Here the revolution was left and right, under an institutional monopoly. Those who wanted to impose a more radical version of one sign or another were isolated or eliminated,” says Mario Santiago, researcher at the Mora Institute. “The extreme right sectors associated with militant Catholicism with the help of some businessmen found political expression in the PANism of the eighties,” he says. And a good part of them are still there, in the National Action Party (PAN), the only one that stood up to the PRI for decades without achieving power until the turn of the century, with Vicente Fox at the helm.
In September 2021, a political earthquake shook Mexico when several PAN senators received the leader of the Spanish far-right, Santiago Abascal, and a handful of Vox deputies. In historical terms, Mexican independence is still very young and the presence of a leader who likes to revel in the conquest of New Spain and disguise himself as Hernán Cortés raised a cloud of dust from which the more moderate PAN senators soon distanced themselves. Nobody gave credit. Ultra-right in Mexico? But there were those who considered, like Verástegui, that the PAN was lukewarm with its aspirations, marked above all by stale Catholic postulates.
A year later, Mexico hosted the global far-right, in a congress organized by Verástegui in which Steve Bannon, Eduardo Bolsonaro, Javier Milei and the Chilean José Antonio Kast participated, live or by videoconference, among many others on one side. and another from the Atlantic Ocean. The extreme right was emboldened and Verástegui announced his leap into politics with an assault rifle resting on his shoulder and a threat: “Look what we are going to do to the terrorists of the 2030 agenda, climate change and gender ideology.” ”. In the country of weapons, the matter caused a great stir, but it did not escalate, Mexico continued on its path.
In 2018, after decades of PRI and PAN, a new party conquered power, Morena, led by the current president, Andrés Manuel López Obrador, with an incontestable majority that it maintains today and that predicts, according to polls, a new comfortable victory in June for her successor, Claudia Sheinbaum. The right is trying to take advantage of some of its unfulfilled promises, such as the elimination of the insecurity that the country is experiencing, with an average of 100 violent deaths a day. But that is not the issue that most worries the population, no matter how tired they are of it. The Republic is experiencing rosy days economically, according to international organizations, with a strong currency, solid investments and exports, minimum wages above inflation for the first time and a promising future that lies in the relocation of companies. It is easy for the president to call the Argentine Milei's policy “hypocritical.”
“The country is polarized into two sides, on the one hand, Morena, and on the other, the opposition bloc, with the PAN as the main party, because its allies in the PRI and PRD are in complete decline. If the extreme right wants to do something, it will have to ally itself with the PAN, where many are already present, but they do not say it openly so as not to scare the population,” says María Eugenia Valdés Vega, an expert in Political Processes from the Metropolitan Autonomous University. “Mexico continues to be a country of liberal traditions and aspirations against inequality that do not allow the extreme right to express itself as it wants or can in other countries,” she maintains. Vega Valdés also considers that the electoral system is so labyrinthine for the formation of parties and presenting independent candidacies that it borders on the ridiculous, which is why “the extreme right does not have it easy either.”
In other areas, Mexico is still in the social conquest of rights already consolidated in older democracies, such as abortion, gay marriages or secularism, even though the country successfully separated itself from the powerful Church that the Spanish bequeathed in the viceroyalty. So the strongly Catholic banner brandished by those from Verástegui does not find accommodation among citizens, with feminism at its best.
In 1953, the national organization of Yunque was founded in Mexico, where even today the most Catholic and extreme right groups are grouped, with some universities under its aegis and PAN congressmen related to it. The links of this group with the Spanish far-right Vox are notable, even greater than the muscle it shows in its own country. “The extreme right, disappointed by previous PAN six-year terms that did not address its agenda, has taken refuge in the cradle in which it was born, that is, pro-life, family or anti-abortion organizations, in some States of Mexico. They had strong growth around 2012, but it has retreated to the old spaces,” says Mario Santiago, a good expert on this political faction. “Businessmen inject neoliberal economic ideology into the Catholic agenda of El Yunque,” he adds, but businessmen are now very quiet due to the economic development of the country. “The ideology of the Mexican extreme right is associated more than with fascism, with a strong statist presence, with Spanish Falangism, which is why it sounds so anachronistic, so Cold War, st
ill against long hair among men, homosexuality and favor of the classic family nucleus,” says Santiago. “I don't want to be a futurist or a catastrophist, but I believe that the rest of the monsters, like Trump or Bolsonaro or Milei, are children of economic crises, something that does not happen today in Mexico. But you have to pay attention,” he suggests.
In any case, the far-right sandwich in which Mexico is immersed from the north and the south cannot penetrate its borders, even though Verástegui saw hope in that congress in which he was encouraged by the loudest voices on the planet to give the leap into politics. For now.
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