The electoral campaign is ending as the fight for the presidency began many months ago: with an opposition that sees Morena’s steamroller coming and believes that there is still time to reach agreements and join forces. Alito Moreno, the leader of the PRI, said it last week when he invited Movimiento Ciudadano to walk together to “build a great opposition front prior to the electoral result,” because “the MC candidate has no chance of winning,” he assured. he. And this Monday he supported the same idea Luis Donaldo Colosio, and used the same verb, build, to outline a possible scenario in which Jorge Álvarez Máynez declines in favor of Xóchitl Gálvez. Journalist Azucena Uresti asked him exactly about that and the most popular of the Emecistas declared: “If he is interested in that construction, it would be a possibility.” In campaign times there is no innocent declaration. When asked on Radio Formula, Colosio had the opportunity three times to explain that his proposal consisted of Xóchitl Gálvez declining for Máynez and not the other way around. But he did not. And both Colosio and Moreno have said that all this is for the good of Mexico, that before personalisms, there is Mexico. Whether someone is finally going to abandon the fight so that the other can follow is still a future question, but that idea, which gained strength again at the end of the second presidential debate, hangs insistently over the head of Jorge Álvarez Máynez.
The silence has been thunderous since Colosio uncovered that idea on Monday morning. The heads of the PRI and the PAN, who have insisted so much in recent days on reissuing the initiative of a united opposition, remained cautious, not a tweet, not a statement. Neither did the candidate of Fuerza y Corazón por México, Xóchitl Gálvez, who gave so many winks to the Citizen Movement some time ago. Since April 28, when the second presidential debate was held in which Gálvez’s team declared itself the winner and the candidate renewed her strength and enthusiasm to head into the last stretch of the campaign, the word decline has not stopped being heard. Everyone assumed that it was Máynez who had to give in, given the polls, which place him in third place in the race, although he has been increasing his numbers little by little. And it is Máynez who has had to defend himself during this time. “Let them decline for me,” he came to say, asserting his strength. The unexpected thing has been that the idea now comes from a coreligionist like Colosio, who is seeking a senatorship for the Citizen Movement in these elections. Máynez has also had to defend himself against his words. He has come out to say that, in reality, Colosio asked for Gálvez’s decline, which had been a misinterpretation. But Colosio has not spoken out again to explain whether his party’s candidate was right. More silence.
The Citizen Movement’s candidacy arrived late and involved in controversy. When the two contenders in the lead had been campaigning for some time, Samuel García, governor of Nuevo León, stepped forward for the orange party, who soon raised the limited voting possibilities with which his party started, given the polarization politics that the country lives. That adventure, however, had an abrupt end through the courts that forced García to return to the governorship and appoint Álvarez Máynez as his replacement, a very unknown man who has needed televised debates to reinforce his candidacy. Máynez picked up the baton of a bankrupt party, precisely because some MC heavyweights, such as the governor of Jalisco, Enrique Alfaro, had already raised in the summer of last year the need for the opposition to go to the elections like Fuenteovejuna, all of them a. He found no echo in the party leadership and broke with it. His political career is, for now, interrupted, waiting for the elections to pass to dedicate himself to other tasks.
The voices that have asked MC to join the rest of the opposition to stand up to Morena have not been few since then, but the party has based its entire campaign on the possibility of turning around the numbers and rising in a second place relegating Gálvez to third. To do this, the beast to beat was not so much Morena, but also, like the alliance of the PAN and the PRI, two parties that they classify as “the old and the worst policy” in the recent history of Mexico, so a alliance with them at this time would seem strange, there would be few who would consider that MC betrays the oft-repeated message that they represent a new Mexico that has nothing to do with those traditional parties. In fact, the points that Máynez has been scratching in the polls have been at the expense of Gálvez.
It was the coalition of the PRI and the PAN that managed to dislodge Samuel García from his presidential aspirations, exhibiting its strength in the Congress of Nuevo León and forcing him to abort his federal project. It is not surprising that now, an alliance of all opposition forces needs a powerful argument, something similar to what Alito Moreno or Colosio himself has said, that is, Mexico as a territory devastated by violence and other unrest and in need of care. intensive measures that justify a lesser evil. More or less the same idea that united the PRI and the PAN, always enemies, as a single force to defeat Morena, that is, Andrés Manuel López Obrador, now embodied in Claudia Sheinbaum. The polls are stubborn, however, and the strength of the opposition alliance would not be enough to add the Citizen Movement to win on June 2.
Therefore, all speculations are possible, which will be revealed over time. Colosio did not want to run for president, despite the fact that his last name alone brings together the sympathies of Mexicans and the inheritance of a truncated admiration, which they professed to his father, murdered in 1994 when he was a PRI candidate and promised to turn around the country like a sock. Colosio Jr. took a step back on this occasion despite the fact that he was obtaining excellent results among the preferences of Mexicans already in 2021, when a survey placed him behind Claudia Sheinbaum and Marcelo Ebrard.
There has not been a single party that has not wanted to take him into its ranks, the PAN once offered him the candidacy for Nuevo León and Morena wanted him on its list for the mayor of Monterrey. A long time before, when he was 21 years old, the PRI put it in his hands to be a multi-member representative, without even having to win an election. He interpreted it as a morbid offer associated with his last name and declined.
Now it is he who proposes the decline, without specifying a name, which must especially bother Máynez’s campaign headquarters, because Gálvez’s will be happy with the possibility of an alliance. Máynez told reporters this Monday: “I already know that the PRI and PAN coalition is operating, I am not naive to understand what it is about these days, but today it is very clear who is in second place,” he said. “Mexico is much bigger than those interest groups.” And in the same statements he added: “Colosio is very clear about what the country needs.”
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