Today starts 2024

Yesterday our very dear colleague passed away Ricardo Rocha. A very good friend from many years ago, who generated some of the best pages in journalism in recent decades, but, above all, a extraordinary human being. A big hug with all the affection to yours. You will be missed Ricardo.

Let’s go with other topics. Beyond yesterday’s electoral results, both of which were foreseeable, the truth is that The campaign for the presidential elections begins today.the governorships, the congress, which will be defined next year.

It has been said that the State of Mexico is a laboratory, always I have doubted it if we talk about results, because on very few occasions in the last six-year terms have the results of the elections in the state of Mexico coincided with the presidential ones that are held the following year.

the electorate can be volatileeven when there is a political operation as intense as the one we have seen this Sunday (or like the one we saw six years ago in the state of Mexico to win Alfredo del Mazo) but the truth is that the definition of a general election is given by other variables that may or may not change throughout a year.

We must start with a central fact: Brunette has its pre-candidates already in the campaign and tomorrow the formal process will begin to decide who will lead the ballot in 2024: Claudia Sheinbaun He will arrive with the letter of having led the electoral operation in the state of Mexico; Marcelo Ebrard today he will announce his proposal to select a candidate that Claudia and Adam Augusto Lopez because it implies resigning from their posts; the Secretary of the Interior pinned a medal to his lapel having reached the agreement that the President Lopez Obrador wanted in the expropriation of the railway section of Grupo México.

But the truth is that all three are proselytizing; It is not perceived that any of them, whether they like the result of the internal process or not, is going to resign and go to another party; and their knowledge levels far exceed any potential adversary of the opposition.

That is the biggest problem with it. There are characters with name knowledge, such as Luis Donaldo Colosio (inherited from his father without a doubt) and some others because they have been on the political scene for years, like Santiago Creel, but hardly any emerging figures, just Lily Tellez. But we must go further: one of the cases that will have to be defined in the coming hours and days is whether or not there will be an opposition alliance by 2024, if so, how the candidate will be chosen and even what alliance there will be. Citizen Movement insists on going alone and even announced that he will have a formal candidate in December (only six months before the election), although many speculate that what he is looking for is an alliance, but only with the BREADreiterating that of 2018 that led to Ricardo Anaya and had electoral results to be forgotten.

In the PRI nobody knows if Alejandro Moreno really bet on the alliance. Everything indicates that it is, but movements such as proposing himself as a candidate, or blocking other applicants for the tricolor, is an indirect way of boycotting it. Alito is not a viable candidate, unless he wants to replicate the model of Roberto Madrazo in 2006. Of the other PRI members that participate, I think the only one that could be viable is Claudia Ruiz Massieu. Manolo Jimenez that will triumph in Coahuila and has a very good personal profileit will start a path that, I think, has its sights set more on 2030 than on 2024, but for now it is a acceptable political for many and that wins elections, even if it is still at a local level.

I do not think that the Green, much less the PT, will finally go alone: ​​they will go in alliance with Morena and in any case they will be able to go with their own candidates in some governorships to rescue the records, as in the Green in Chiapas.

If those are the scenarios the opposition will be able to do little if it is divided next year. But even going in an alliance, it has to clearly define its candidates, not only for the presidency, but also for all the posts that will be in dispute, notably for the congress and the governorships.

The former governors of the PAN, headed by vincent foxwho asked their party this weekend to open to society to choose candidates and forget about locks like the ones you want to impose Marko Cortes, to have a million signatures of support to be able to compete. Repeating a distribution of candidacies like in 2018 will not make an opposition alliance competitive, even less against a state party that is willing, as we saw yesterday, to do what is necessary for its candidates to win. If you wanted to see how the Plan Cwe already had a test in the state of Mexico (and also, to a lesser extent in Coahuila, with the forced decline of two parties) but in 2024 the operation will be geometrically enhanced and taken to the entire national territory.

Of course, many things can happen in a year, which is why in the State of Mexico the PRI won the elections in the State of Mexico five consecutive times and on three of those occasions lost the presidential election the following year. But for there to be changes there must be a strategy, scenarios, characters that drive that transformation. To this day we see them only in Morena. The opposition continues to take its time as if it really had it.

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