Mexico City.- The Party of the Democratic Revolution (PRD), a group that was key in Mexico’s transition to democracy and starred in the most disputed elections in the country’s history, has begun what is emerging as the beginning of the end of its 35 years of history.
Even before the National Electoral Institute announced on Monday night that it was losing its registration as a national political party by failing to obtain 3% of the votes in the June 2 elections, several videos released by local media already showed how some of Its militants took out boxes, plants and personal objects from many of its offices, which were beginning to empty.
The administrative process for its extinction will be long and the PRD – the third largest political group in number of militants, with almost a million members – plays its last card by challenging some counts before the electoral court that seem difficult to win.
“It lost half a million votes and has become a token opposition because most of the discourse on the left has been monopolized by (the ruling party) Morena,” explained Georgina de la Fuente, an academic member of the Observatory of Political Reforms of Latin America. In his opinion, one of his problems is that he failed to renew either his speech or his leaders.
The PRD emerged in 1989 as a confluence of many currents of the Mexican left—some of them emerging from the PRI—and its history is fundamentally linked to two great figures in Mexican politics: Cuauhtémoc Cárdenas, the son of one of the most iconic presidents. from Mexico; and the current president, Andrés Manuel López Obrador.
Both built a left-wing political alternative that all academics consider was key to Mexico’s democratic transition, although the PRD never won the Presidency.
Cárdenas lost the presidential elections in 1988 – before the formal origin of the party -, those in 1994 and those in 2000. That year the right-wing National Action Party (PAN) removed the PRI from power and the era of political alternation would begin. would consolidate democracy in Mexico.
Subsequently, López Obrador lost the 2006 presidential election to the PAN by a difference of just 0.56% of the votes in what were the most controversial and disputed elections in Mexican history. And he lost again in 2012, against the PRI. He only managed to win when he left the PRD to create his own movement, Morena.
Despite the failures in the presidential elections, the PRD had been “the left-wing party par excellence and a very effective opposition,” said Georgina de la Fuente. In addition, it governed Mexico City—now considered the most progressive in the country—since This entity began to elect its mayors by popular vote. Cárdenas was the first, in 1997, López Obrador governed from 2000 to 2005.
But the party never recovered from the 2012 presidential defeat that led first to the departure of López Obrador to create his own movement, Morena, and then to that of Cárdenas.
Morena would be formally born in 2014 and would recruit many of the PRD’s political cadres but failed to convince Cárdenas, who stayed on the sidelines and became one of the most respected political figures in Mexico, even by his political opponents.
Within the PRD, what Agustín Basave, political scientist and former president of the party, called “the stage of the tribes” began, a period of internal struggles that Basave tried to reunify without success when he assumed leadership of the group for a brief period between 2015. and 2016.
As he explained in an interview with AP, the lack of institutionality and corruption were the two factors that caused the group’s loss of weight, along with the fact that electoral defeats became profitable so that the PRD could make pacts with other groups, such as the PRI and the PAN. “His identity was then completely blurred,” said Basave.
The latest example is the opposition coalition that competed in the general elections on April 2 and in which the PRD, allied with the conservatives of the PAN and the PRI—an unnatural alliance—registered its most resounding defeat.
While waiting for the electoral court to resolve the challenges, the president of the PRD, Jesús Zambrano, has insisted that the battle is not lost. The party “continues to have a fundamental force in the country,” he said shortly before the electoral institute’s statement.
Nobody rules out that the PRD could be reborn with that or another name. “The militancy is still there and the leftist agendas are still there, it may be a time to renew itself,” said De la Fuente.
“It is the natural space for the emergence of a social democratic party in Mexico,” Basave said. “If it ceases to exist, then we will have to start from scratch. “Mexico needs new political parties.”
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