AMLO’s MORENA at a crossroads as Mexico heads towards midterm elections
As Mexico heads towards midterm elections, it’s a key moment to analyze the trajectory of Andrés Manuel López Obrador (AMLO) and his political party, the Movement for National Regeneration (MORENA). While there was mass euphoria after his triumph against the traditional PRI-PAN dictatorship in 2018, three years into his mandate, the limits and betrayals of his political project are in full view.
Although AMLO attempted to launch a socially progressive, redistributive development strategy anchored by extractivism and megaprojects called “the Fourth Transformation”, the results on the ground are mixed. Initially, AMLO’s government seemed to deliver, taking on a populist character. Under the pressures of the Trump administration, though, AMLO caved in on key issues like immigration and trade.
His administration has also been hit with high-level corruption scandals—an issue he promised to tackle. He also intervened on behalf of General Salvador Cienfuegos, the former Secretary of National Defense, who was captured by the Drug Enforcement Administration (DEA) in early 2021 for his alleged involvement in drug-trafficking. AMLO rescued the general, claiming the arrest was politically motivated.
While AMLO was confrontational at first, he has become mostly accommodationist and acts as mediator between ruling class sectors. Furthermore, he has rehabilitated the military, enrolling the army corps in megaprojects to push his agenda while the Ayotzinapa case remains unresolved. Indeed, social movements and land defenders have caught the ire of the president and he insists on denigrating the feminist movement, denying the patriarchal impacts of the pandemic, and arguing that the feminist movement is collaborating with the right-wing to topple him.
In the following article, Edgard Sánchez of the Workers’ Revolutionary Party (PRT), Mexican section of the Fourth International, reports on the convergence and contradictions in the lead up to Mexico’s midterm elections which will mark the remaining three years of AMLO’s regime. This abbreviated version of the original article was translated for puntorojo by Héctor A. Rivera.
The class composition of MORENA
As the deadline to register candidates for 15 governorships of Mexico’s midterm elections has passed, it is possible to glimpse at the composition of the regime and its relationship with AMLO's government.
Due to the relationship of forces in the current party system, and the political polarization that AMLO himself has promoted with his binary discourse of a supposed fight between liberals and conservatives, two blocks are emerging in the electoral field. On the one hand, the block of parties around the President (including MORENA, the far right represented by the evangelicals, and parties of union bosses) and on the other hand, the block of the electoral right of the PAN, PRI and PRD.
In this scheme, as we have pointed out before, there is no political alternative that represents the working class or the socialist left. Not only the anti-capitalist political left, but in general the anti-systemic movements of the working class, the indigenous peoples in resistance against ecocidal and neoliberal megaprojects and the feminist movement in struggle against capitalist patriarchy. In these elections and in this arrangement of the current political party system, no one represents us.
In these elections and in this arrangement of the current political party system, no one represents us.
Therefore, our concern is not to define a voting formula nor to seek candidacies that supposedly defend the demands of the movement with parties that are, in reality, against these movements. This does not mean that in terms of the analysis of the political situation and the framework of struggle, which we will have to continue to confront power, that we are indifferent to examine the rearrangements of the political personnel of the ruling classes.
In this context it is interesting to see how the candidacies of MORENA and the other allies of López Obrador are being adjusted. Not because of any illusion in the recovery of some social demand by MORENA and its candidacies, which is not what is at stake, but to understand the composition of the social bloc coming to power. Of course, there are still illusions in some people that the famous popularity “survey” will favor them to become candidates for a federal or local deputy (or even a city council seat, since more than one thousand positions will be elected in 2021).
In the coming days the “survey” will begin to determine which pre-registered candidates will be excluded. And the protests, disappointment and complaints against the “survey” will begin. Based on the candidates already chosen for state governorships, it is possible to predict that there will be a similar pattern of selection at the other levels of office. This outcome means all of MORENA candidates will be determined by the weight of bourgeois currents in each region, will lean to the right, and will likely be defectors from the PRI or the PAN who now see opportunities in working with MORENA. If anyone claiming to be from the left or from the movement is selected, they will clearly be a minority in this scenario.
New clothes for the old regime
The selection of the candidacies for state governments by MORENA are relevant for several reasons. In the first place, because in the current relationship of electoral forces it is very likely that they will be the ones to win the majority (perhaps in two or three states traditionally controlled by the PAN or the PRI there will be relative competition). The 2021 elections will be important for the consolidation (or not) of a new political regime.
It implies not only which political current of MORENA (or of the President's entourage) will head the presidential candidacy in 2024, but which sectors of the dominant classes (many of which are already represented in AMLO's government) will finally settle in as a new hegemonic bloc. Furthermore, it will determine how the differences between them, which AMLO has tried to mediate, will be resolved, conciliated or favored. This conforms with what we have called the “Bonapartist” twists of a government of “late progressivism” compared to previous models in Latin America.[1]
AMLO's “late progressivism” has brought about a discourse supposedly against neoliberalism but limiting it to the fight against corruption, and at the same time the continuity of neoliberal projects and reforms such as the megaprojects (like the so-called “Mayan Train” (or Trans-Isthmus Project), as well as a neoliberal policy around the militarization of public security through the creation of the new National Guard, and the growing weight of the army.
The support and defense of the armed forces, in both senses, is relevant. The defense of the armed institution and its public image stood out in the case of General Cienfuegos, who was arrested by the DEA and acquitted by the Mexican government. It is also present in the in the material support and infrastructure work by the army, including the construction of the Santa Lucia airport and sections of the Mayan Train. All of this is occurring alongside misguided policies in the response to the COVID-19 crisis and the ensuing economic crisis.
Furthermore, AMLO continues to participate in a peculiar relationship with Yankee imperialism, with both parties, while maintaining a rhetorical defense of national sovereignty. In reality, AMLO has submitted to the US in regards to immigration policy and the renewal of NAFTA (now USMCA), which point to a certain accommodation or readjustment of the ruling classes in the new regime.
The candidacies for governors of the 15 states at stake (almost half of the country) point to tendencies in the struggle for hegemony among the different sectors of the ruling classes. That is why the majority of MORENA’s candidates are personalities coming out of the PRI and the PAN. Even recent converts to MORENA come to the party from the old PRI of the dirty war era under former president Echeverría. This conciliation with sectors of the bourgeoisie of PRI or PAN origin, reinforce the possible dynamics for the continuity of the regime initiated by AMLO, with all its Bonapartist turns, to move to the right. This model be seen in Mexican history, as witnesses with the regime of left reformist Lázaro Cárdenas transitioning to a right-wing successor in Ávila Camacho in 1940.
Consolidation and continuity
Someone who fits in this readjustment is Marcelo Ebrard, the Secretary of Foreign Affairs, who is not even formally a member of MORENA, but who currently has great political weight and although he also comes from the PRI, he does not come from the reformist Cuauhtémoc Cárdenas current of 1988. Rather, he emerges from opposite side—the neoliberal current of Carlos Salinas de Gortari.
Today, Ebrard is a central figure in the presidential cabinet along with another cabinet figure, Mario Delgado, the president of MORENA. For this reason, as we said before, AMLO himself has warned of the possibility that his project will not continue after his six-year term. “Nothing is eternal” he says. And since he has not really been concerned with the institutionalization of his party, the difficulties to consolidate a new political regime are greater. Of course, the current scheme may adjust in the following years because the inter-bourgeois struggle, not only within the PRI-PAN electoral right, but also within the government, may force some reforms. This is due to the worsening of the economic crisis impending re-emergence of independent mass movements in struggle and resistance against its social costs.
As we have pointed out before, the 2021 elections have peculiar characteristics since these are the largest elections ever because of the number of positions at stake. They are also significant because of the possible consolidation of a new legislative caste due to the reform that allows re-election and also because of the greater number of women who will participate as candidates and who might win (due to legislative gender parity). These are the result of the reforms that the feminist movement achieved after decades of struggle.
What will be relevant in this process will be the consolidation of struggle for hegemony in the new bloc in power of the various competing bourgeois forces, within a larger party system that excludes the representation of the working class or anti-capitalist or anti-systemic movements. That is why even with the greater participation of women, there is no guarantee of real change, since the traditional parties do not recognize the oppression of women and have no interest in the fight for their liberation. A woman in power will not necessarily translate to an awareness of the conditions of women’s oppression. This could bring about candidates like MORENA’s Lily Tellez of Sonora state who is against abortion or Morena’s Félix Salgado of Guerrero state, accused of sexual harassment and whose candidacy was recently cancelled by the National Electoral Institute. The problem is not just the candidates in MORENA but the party itself. There isn’t a single party in the institutional arena with a feminist consciousness.
There isn’t a single party in the institutional arena with a feminist consciousness
The composition of these 15 governments will therefore be important for the federal government as it concludes its six-year term and the definition of the regime towards 2024. It is the team with which AMLO will govern until the end of the six-year and should eliminate illusions of those who believe that a “popular” orientation of the government and Morena is possible.
A detailed review of states at stake is discussed in the original article. For now, it’s enough to note that the block of right-wing parties represented by the PRI, PAN and PRD are in coalition in 11 of the 15 states where there will be gubernatorial elections. In Chihuahua, Nuevo Leon and Guerrero, the coalition is partial. In Chihuahua it’s PAN-PRD, in Nuevo Leon and Guerrero PRI-PRD. And in Querétaro, where the PAN considers itself to be hegemonic, the three are competing against each other.
For its part, MORENA is relying on a long list of “unsightly” candidates (as they are euphemistically called), among them criminally corrupt union bosses and PAN right-wingers (these are the governors—the worst is yet to come), that can mobilize their clientelist networks to get the votes for the party and the list of figures should dissipate any doubt that these are exceptions in one state or another. These candidates are not the result of a local problem coming from those in charge of MORENA at the state level, but correspond to the general line of the party which is endorsed by AMLO himself.
As we stated elsewhere, with the current rearrangement of forces, everything indicates that MORENA (and its allies) will have the majority of votes, even if it does not have the famous 30 million votes of the presidential election. This is because this is a midterm election without the presidential figure on the ballot and because of MORENA's wear and tear. That is to say that abstentionism will surely return to its previous levels.
When we conclude that there is no alternative in the elections of 2021, we are once again reaffirming the need to continue the construction…of a revolutionary party that must be clearly anti-capitalist, feminist, ecosocialist and internationalist.
When we conclude that there is no alternative in the elections of 2021, we are once again reaffirming the need to continue the construction, beyond the electoral processes, of a revolutionary party that must be clearly anti-capitalist, feminist, ecosocialist and internationalist. In this logic we are trying to put forward a political and social pole of attraction, as an alternative to the right and to AMLO’s “late progressivism”, with the independent movements of the working class, with the feminist movement in struggle against capitalist patriarchy and with the indigenous movements in struggle against neoliberal, ecocidal and predatory megaprojects.
Notes
[1] Bonapartism refers to a formulation developed by the Marxist tradition and applied to Mexico after the Mexican Revolution of 1910-20 produced a stalemate between popular forces on the one hand and bourgeois forces on the other. According to Trotsky's analysis, what arose was a Bonapartist regime that pretended to stand above the different classes in struggle, while ruling in the context of an international capitalist system.
Edgard Sánchez is a member of the central committee of the Partido Revolucionario de las y los Trabajadores in Mexico.
