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 Editorials | Opinions | May 2008 
To Find Renewed Relevance, Mexican Left Must Lose López Obrador
 Patrick Corcoran - World Politics Review
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 |  | The result of López Obrador's confrontational posture has been disaster, both for him and his party. |  | | | |
Torreón, Mexico - The Mexican political class doesn't agree on much, but no one denies that the country's political left today is a hopeless mess. Every day brings a fresh embarrassment, a new descent into the bizarre. The present state of affairs is all the more conspicuous given the heights to which the left rose less than two short years ago. Ironically, the decline can be traced to the very man who almost lifted the left into the presidency.
As 2006 dawned, everything was gangbusters for the darling of the Mexican left, Andrés Manuel López Obrador. The ex-mayor of Mexico City enjoyed a double-digit lead in polls for the July presidential election, and seemed poised to join the growing ranks of leftists leading Latin American nations. His party, the Democratic Party of the Revolution (PRD), was likewise optimistic about the future. It had long maintained a stranglehold on Mexico City, and a ride on López Obrador's coattails in the upcoming contests promised unprecedented nationwide success.
July 2, 2006, turned out to be a bittersweet day. López Obrador somehow let victory slip away (losing by less than a percentage point to Felipe Calderón), but the PRD scored wins around the country and became the second largest party in . Ignoring the potential of the latter and focusing instead on the injustice of the former, López Obrador called his followers into the streets, claiming fraud (though, tellingly, without providing any substantial proof). And there, precisely, is where the left first went wrong, with López Obrador leading the misguided charge.
Every one of López Obrador's post-election maneuvers ratcheted up the tension in Mexico City. He called on his followers to camp out on one of the city's busiest thoroughfares (at least, it had been busy before all the tents went up). He held a series of increasingly heated rallies in the Zócalo, Mexico City's version of Times Square. In November, an audience of his followers declared López Obrador the "legitimate" president, complete with a cabinet and a farcical inauguration. When Calderón was sworn in a few weeks later, López Obrador encouraged his party to physically block the ceremony, which resulted in punches and chairs being thrown, an altogether sad example of farce. He forbade any political dialogue between PRD backbenchers and Calderón's National Action Party (PAN). To varying degrees, the PRD supported him at every turn, but Mexicans were increasingly fed up with his antics.
The result of López Obrador's confrontational posture has been disaster, both for him and his party. The PAN struck an alliance with the third loudest ional voice, the Institutional Party of the Revolution (PRI), and repeatedly bypassed the intransigent PRD. Despite the weak mandate provided by his narrow victory, Calderón quickly went to work; in his first 16 months in office, enacted four major structural reforms, exactly four more than the number passed during the presidency that preceded Calderón's. Mexico rewarded its new president with approval ratings that hovered around 60 percent for nearly all of 2007, an astonishing figure given that he was elected with barely a third of the vote.
Meanwhile, the PRD has split into moderate and extremist groups, with support for López Obrador a major fault line. The factions have bickered incessantly over tactics (try to block the PAN's legislation or work to make it more progressive?) and strategy (retool for future campaigns or spark a revolution?). When elections for party leadership were held in March, the only winners were the PRD's adversaries; rampant fraud by both sides exposed the party machinery as corrupt to its core, and at this writing, two months later, there still is no winner. The PRD's dissolution is not hard to fathom.
Despite its problems, the PRD retains a 3-year-old's instinct for grabbing attention. In the midst of the fight over the election for party leader, López Obrador called on his allies to occupy the ional building in order to prevent passage of controversial oil reforms. They dutifully carried out his instructions, further undermining the party's image in the eyes of the public. Despite the PRD's stunts, the oil reform will eventually be passed (probably in late summer). This is a perfect distillation of the party's problems. It's not just that the PRD has relegated itself to extremism. Politically, López Obrador has helped it earn a far worse label: irrelevance.
Time and again, López Obrador has misjudged the extent to which Mexicans have embraced democracy. Always a polarizing figure, he has now become one of the nation's most unpopular. A recent survey in the newspaper Excelsior measuring the approval ratings of 24 prominent public figures found that López Obrador's was the third lowest. Calderón, on the other hand, was the third most popular figure.
In addition to an enduring strain of extremism, the Mexican left has long had a somewhat schizophrenic identity, bouncing every few years from triumph to self-immolation to political irrelevance to victimhood to triumph once more. Seen in light of this history, the events of the past two years events are perhaps unsurprising. But they are nonetheless dispiriting.
Had the PRD worked to consolidate its gains and remove its populist taint, there would have been no ceiling for the party's success. Negotiating today with the man who beat you yesterday may be distasteful, but that's politics. Embracing political martyrdom, as López Obrador most certainly did, may have seemed like a noble and appropriate gesture to Che Guevara cultists, but the PRD essentially turned its back on the most successful election day in its history. It said "no thanks" to the millions who turned out to vote PRD senators and deputies into office. For a major party in a democracy, this wasn't merely foolish; it was political malpractice.
In the short term, the PRD's abdication of opposition was a gift to the PAN, which has checked off one agenda item after another, and the PRI, which has thrived in the roll of legislative kingmaker. But in the long term, the absence of a reasonable, vital left spells trouble for everyone.
The PAN is a suspect entity in the eyes of many Mexicans, caricatured in the past as right-wing extremists in bed with business. There has been some truth to this caricature, and the weakness of the left only makes it more likely that the PAN will return to its old ways. The existence of a formidable leftist coalition would force the PAN to continue to concentrate on its more technocratic side, and force it to pay more attention to the abominable social ills that persist in Mexico. The election in 2006 was a perfect example: Only a relatively non-ideological candidate like Calderón could have defeated López Obrador, and he barely pulled it off. After facing such a strong challenge from the left, Calderón has given social policy, especially education, a prominent role in his agenda. The PAN's strategy for the 2009 mid-term elections, built around the slogan "Live Better," aims to draw attention to the government's social programs. Calderón has also jettisoned rabid partisans from the PAN leadership. All this has made the PAN a stronger party, and shows that the benefits of a strong PRD extend across the political spectrum.
More immediately, the PRD's decline is bad news for the nation. The impact of Calderón's term likely will reverberate for decades. The collective goal of the president's reforms is quite broad: to reorient the economic and political culture to ensure future growth and stability, and to give future leaders the tools with which to handle the problems that remain unresolved. Essentially, Calderón is attempting to decisively bury the authoritarian regime that left power in 2000. But thanks to the PRD's implosion, this process is taking place without the input and participation of an important political voice.
The decay of the leftist party doesn't mean the disappearance of leftist sentiment. Insofar as political parties are supposed to represent the views of the voters, left-leaning Mexicans don't have an electoral outlet for their views, which can only filter them toward frustration and extremism. The left's leaders are wavering between two options: participating in the democratic process, which inevitably includes the indignity of having voters prefer the other guys; and trying to force a second Mexican Revolution, which will surely fail. Until the party of the left decides on the democratic option once and for all, progressive Mexicans have no way to impact the debate about Mexico's future. A good start would be putting Andrés Manuel López Obrador out to pasture.
Patrick Corcoran is a writer based in Torreón, Coahuila, in northern Mexico. |
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