Translated by Monserrat Rivera-Chao
When electoral spaces are very fragmented, as occurs in various countries, political parties find themselves obligated to look for alliances in order to open the path to stable forms of government and also, to approve reforms that require wide consensus. However, pacts awaken a lot of resistance in fundamentalist sects of political parties that consider them a kind of union contrary to nature. They seem to believe that parties are gifted with an essential nature that should not be soiled by coalitions that go against their ideological purity, as if political organisms were kept from changing or evolving.
Moreover, it is evident that parties cannot function adequately without a certain flexible pragmatic that allows them to rank their demands and give in on certain points with the intention of accomplishing more important things. Spain, for example, is going through a period that unavoidably demands the formation of alliances and the approval of pacts between dissimilar forces, in contrast to the United States, where the old two-party system continues to work.
The electoral panorama in Mexico before the upcoming June 5th elections [for twelve governors and other local offices] does not force the parties to perform alliances. However, the parties of the democratic opposition, who resist the authoritarianism of the Party of the Institutional Revolution and its attempts to restore the old regime, evidently have strong reasons to form alliances. And the Party of Institutional Revolutions has many motives to resist the change, coalescing with other forces and boycotting the alliances of its adversaries. This year’s elections are very important because they occur in this enormous Jurassic park that are the state governments, where the most out of date and corrupt habits of the old authoritarianism find themselves most deeply entrenched.
In 2010 the coalitions succeeded in eroding the rancid customs of “revolutionary nationalist" power in Oaxaca, Puebla and Sinaloa, where with great difficulty they paved the way to a new political dynamic, that did not always bring good results, but that at least left a dent in and altered the ancient forms of doing politics. In those same 2010 elections a similar alliance in Veracruz was frustrated, one of the states where the Party of the Institutional Revolution had never been defeated.
The following year, 2011, the intrigues of the most outdated sectors of the National Action Party and the Party of the Democratic Revolution prevented an electoral impact in the State of Mexico that possibly could have provoked the overthrow of PRI. If these failures had not occurred, it is very likely that Mexico’s political history could have followed a very different track [Peña Nieto had just ended his governorship in the state and was preparing his run for the presidency.]…
Today the conditions are repeated that could lead to the overthrow of old authoritarianism in the elections of Durango, Oaxaca, Veracruz and Zacatecas, where the Party of the Democratic Revolution and the National Action Party have agreed on alliances. Perhaps Veracruz is the most significant state, not only due to its size but also for the fact that the Party of the Institutional Revolution has never been defeated there in elections for governor.
However, the fact that in last [2015 congressional] elections, the fundamentalist populist party, Morena [the Movement for National Regeneration led by Andrés Manuel López Obrador], obtained 12 percent of the votes conspires against a possible defeat of the Party of the Institutional Revolution. That could signify that, once again, the stubborn irrationality of a leftist party ends up favoring PRI authoritarianism. However in the Party of the Democratic Revolution, that is now free from its great populist ballast, it has been very difficult for these alliances with the National Action Party to be accepted. The same thing occurs in this latest contest. Pacts were frustrated in Puebla, Hidalgo and Tamaulipas.
But the alliances and the pacts are not a cure and often cause stagnation and tensions. The agreements of the Pact for Mexico that opened a path for important reforms were more complex. But the political capital that was generated was squandered by the two opposition parties that sponsored it, and it was the PRI that mainly benefited.
Without a doubt, an alliance of the modern right with the social democratic left forces the parties to push some of their postulates aside, with the intention of achieving something very important: stopping the restorationist tendencies [of the PRI] and expanding the territory of democracy. The elections in June will be an interesting political experiment; they could prove the abilities and the intelligence of the political leaders who have promoted the alliances against authoritarianism. They will also be a test that will measure the progress of the restorationist forces and their potential danger in the presidential elections of 2018.
Reforma only allows subscribers to access its articles online.
Roger Bartra holds the Ph.D. in Sociology from the Sorbonne and was trained in Mexico as an ethnologist at the National School of Anthropology and History (INAH). He works as a researcher at the Institute for Social Research at the UNAM and is a member of the National Researchers System. He has been visiting professor and researcher at universities in Mexico and abroad, including the Universitat Pompeu Fabra in Barcelona, Spain; the Paul Getty Center; Johns Hopkins University; University of California at La Jolla; and the University of Wisconsin. In 1996, he received the National University Award.