Luis Rubio
In the golden era of the National Action Party (PAN), the nineties, the party had strong, focused leaderships and a strategic vision that permitted it to begin to build, step by step, the scaffolding that led to its eventually winning the presidency. It was a party of citizens, financed by donations from the society. The mediocrity of its performance and of its leaderships in the successive years took place during the era of governmental financing. Might this be mere coincidence?
The performance of a political party is the result of a multiplicity of factors and cannot be simplified to the degree that the latter paragraph suggests. What can be stated, because it is obvious, is that the PAN did not achieve converting itself into an effective and successful governing party at the federal level. With many exceptions throughout its history of individuals, men and women, who proved to be extraordinary politicians and leaders, in general, the PAN members are not individuals with a vocation for power, something strange for a political party whose raison d’être is precisely that. Distinguished Mexicans of all socioeconomic levels have passed through the PAN, the majority desirous of constructing “a free and generous native land” as its motto has it, but with little inclination for confronting the dilemmas that characterize the labor of governing, which tend to be tough and often less than clear in moral terms.
In contrast, the Institutional Revolutionary Party (PRI) is a party of power, born out of power and it always recruited persons whose nature and vocation comprised exactly the search for and administration of power. In an article from several years back, Aguilar Camin cites Juan Lezama with an anecdote that describes the PRI cover to cover in its Golden Age: “Then, Elpidio Mendoza attended his first successful anteroom session in the new PRIist era and arrived at the Campaign Desk. –Profession? -Politics. -I mean, what is it that you do and know. -Politics. -But a Doctorate, a master’s degree, a profession, something useful… -Just politics –repeated Elpidio Mendoza as he turned on his heel. And stick it out.”
The biographies of the PAN and the PRI are very distinct, starting with that the former had been engendered expressly as a reaction to the latter. Many citizens associate the PRI with corruption, while the PAN’s main driving force was its criticism of the PRI and the corruption. However, once in power, the PAN mimicked the PRI and became as corrupt as a governing party as its predecessor had been, but running a very inferior quality of governance. Nothing describes the contrast better than the declaration of a PRI politician at the time of the Peña Nieto presidential campaign, proudly declaring that “we might be corrupt but we know how to govern.”
Now that the Electoral Tribunal has endorsed the misdeeds of the current PRI leadership, whose objective appears to be to imitate the conduct of the parties in the service of the highest bidder, all this in the context of an opposition that is clearly in the minority, of almost irrelevance given the abusive way in which the distribution of seats in Congress was carried out, the question is whether either of these two parties will have the capacity to transform themselves in order to compete successfully against the almost hegemonic (but not uniform) movement that governs the country today, or whether new organizations will be born that are capable of competing.
The PAN is currently a much larger party in terms of votes won than the PRI, but both have come face to face with the imperative need to rethink themselves, re-conceive themselves, restructure themselves and transform themselves into forces able to compete successfully with the Morena party in the elections of the coming decades, but starting in 2027 at the federal level and, much sooner, at the local level. Their alternative is plain and simple: die.
After the failed and poorly organized alliance of 2024, each of these formations will continue along its own trajectory, leaving the citizenry who did not vote for Morena (a nothing-to-be-sneered-at 45% of the total) before the tessitura of who could effectively represent it and safeguard its concerns and hopes. The myths and aversions at play between these two groupings are legendary (many justified) and there are wide swaths of the electorate that would never vote for one or the other. In this context, the question is whether one of these will be capable of, effectively, responding to the moment, the circumstance and the demands of the citizenry. The inevitable problems that will confront the Morena government constitute an enormous incentive for that transformation.
As it stands, the outlook for the opposition is not commendable. The cost and complexity of creating a new political party is high, but my impression is that the decline of the PRI constitutes an exceptional opportunity for young and attractive leaders, under the guidance of experienced, illustrious and focused (ex) PRI politicians, to have a high probability of success. Freed from the yoke of the pathetic PRI leadership, the group of powerful women and men who are veterans of many fights, with a quality as statesmen that is almost non-existent in the other organizations, could make a big difference. If this group of visionary characters were capable of building a new political party, free of the scourges that characterized the PRI, it could become an unstoppable force against a Morena, a party-movement that seems to be hegemonic but has such a propensity to fracture, fragment and corrupt, in addition to the enormous governance dilemmas it will face, that it could well be defeated sooner than it might appear.
@lrubiof