Peña Nieto tells us that the July 1 national election will be the biggest in our lifetime. Give him credit for avoiding the cliché that it will be the most important. And going by the numbers, he’s got a point.
There will likely be more than the usual three viable presidential candidates on the ballot, more state and local posts than in the past will be decided along with the presidency and Congress, and more Mexicans than ever are expected to vote.
All that may count for bigger. But better? Not so much.
Somehow, even with a new major party added to the mix, along with at least two independents poised to make the ballot and the creation of a baffling left-right coalition, we seem to have ended up with four ho-hummers huddled on the right side of the spectrum opposite the usual change agent.
For an electorate so hungry for a thorough political cleansing, the candidate line-up is unpromising, to say the least — a technocrat, a party hack, a calderonista throwback, and a guy whose political persona depends on a nickname.
Plus, as always, AMLO.
None are what they seem to be. José Antonio Meade, the candidate for the incumbent PRI, is not a member of that party and has served in the past under the PAN, the PRI’s friendly rival. Maybe that’s why he got the party nod — a little bit of distance could help these days, when everybody hates the PRI again.
Not coincidentally, Meade’s people are playing him up as the clean guy, an academic unsullied by scandal. The foreign press has bought that line, but Mexicans don’t vote for a PRI-backed candidate because they think he’s clean.
At any rate, foreign press aside, Meade’s candidacy has been greeted with deafening silence. Some are wondering when he will come down with an unfortunate illness and have to be replaced.
Ricardo Anaya is making the jump from president of the conservative PAN to candidate for the coalition with the left-of-center PRD. But that’s misleading. Joining forces may help the two parties at the state and local level, but in the presidential race, the Frente mostly serves to make the PRD go away (a disappearing act the PRD itself has been carrying out quite effectively for several years now). As far as the electorate is concerned, Anaya is going to be the PAN candidate, period.
Or at least one of them. Margarita Zavala is running as an independent, but her newfound independence has more to do with Anaya’s lock on the PAN nomination than any change of course. If the former first lady qualifies for the ballot, she’ll be seen as a second PAN candidate. Because that's what she is.
Ask anybody outside Nuevo León who Jaime Rodríguez is and you’ll get a lot of blank stares. But what about “El Bronco”? Ah, he’s the longtime PRI loyalist who went independent, won the governorship and is now running for president.
My hunch is that providing career politicians with a way to circumvent unsupportive party leaders is not the best use of independent candidacies.
It can be debated whether Andrés Manuel López Obrador is truly a candidate of the “left” — and it often is. But he’s clearly the only change agent among the viable candidates. That’s why he’s ahead in the polls. It’s also why half the electorate is afraid of him.
With his opposition split into four, he’s got a good thing going. Which could mean that he —not the economy, not crime, not Trump — will be the issue. That’s what happened in 2006, when supporters of the status quo abandoned the PRI candidate (the unlikeable Roberto Madrazo), went all in on Felipe Calderón, and made the election about nothing else but AMLO’s unfitness for office.
The gambit worked, though not by much. We could be in for a re-run.
No comments:
Post a Comment