Uncovering Mexico
Jeremy Schwartz is the Mexico correspondent for Cox Newspapers. He is based in Mexico City.What's on this page?
All the entries posted on March 24, 2008.
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Home > Uncovering Mexico > Archives > 2008 > March > 24
Monday, March 24, 2008
Can the PRD save itself?
The Mexican Left continues to stubbornly implode, and it now appears that the PRD, the left-leaning party that came within a hair of the presidency in 2006, could be headed for a nasty breakup.
A week ago, the PRD held its internal election for party president. The race was between two strong currents within the party: A group of loyalists to former candidate Andres Manuel Lopez Obrador who reject any negotiation with the ruling conservative PAN government, and the New Left, a group of moderate lawmakers who want the PRD to take a more active role in the Congress, where they are the second largest force. The election for party president was supposed to signal which force would be ascendant, and, it was hoped, help unite the fractured party.
Instead, the PRD’s worst nightmare is being birthed. Amid claims of vote fraud, corruption, burning of ballots and even an armed robbery of a polling place in Tamaulipas, neither leading candidate has accepted the results. New Left candidate Jesus Ortega is calling for a vote by vote recount, echoing Lopez Obrador’s “voto por voto” rallying cry from the turbulent summer of 2006.
Needless to say, the PRD’s opponents are taking glee in the party’s misfortunes. The News, Mexico’s English language newspaper, writes in an editorial today that “The PRD internal election couldn’t have gone worse for the leftist party had the PAN written the script.”
And Reforma, a Mexico City daily that is often criticized by the Left, has perhaps the cruelest words for the PRD, comparing it to the authoritarian PRI of days past: “It criticized the old practices of the PRI so much that in the end the PRD has ended up repeating the same tricks that it used to denounce with such fervor,” the paper wrote in an insider’s column today. “The theft of ballots, which was repeated throughout the election, was just one hallmark of the old style that has reappeared in modern times…That’s why there are those who say that the PRD (The Revolutionary Democratic Party) may be revolutionary, but it’s not very democratic.”
The election disaster may be so grave that the party has to re-do it (many voices are calling for an end to the PRD staging its own election and farming it out to a governmental entity). And ironically, the election may end up in the hands of the TRIFE, the nation’s highest electoral court, which is loathed within the PRD because it refused to grant Lopez Obrador’s call for a recount in 2006.
All this has led some observers to speculate that the rift has become unhealable and that whichever faction ends up losing the internal election will create its own splinter party.