Stay Radical or Get Pragmatic? AMLO’s Party Has to Decide

(Bloomberg Businessweek) -- For most of its five short years in existence, Mexico’s Morena party, short for the Movimiento Regeneración Nacional, has revolved around one politician: Andrés Manuel López Obrador. AMLO, as he’s known, treated the party as his personal platform, made most decisions unchallenged, and neglected to build any institutional framework to sustain it. In July of last year, he was elected president in a landslide, receiving 53% of the popular vote, more than double his nearest rival and the most since an opposition candidate first won Mexico’s presidency in 2000. Even more remarkable, Morena and its allies won majorities in both houses of Congress, which surprised even some of the party’s own leaders.

Now almost a year into its dominance of Mexico’s government, Morena is suffering through a period of fierce infighting ahead of its first scheduled leadership contest in late November. At stake is the future direction of the party, whether it should double down on the anti-establishment agitation that helped it ascend to power or become more like a traditional political group: formal, organized, hierarchical. The contest has become so contentious that AMLO threatened to quit Morena.

“It’s a debate between the more confrontational, radical wing of the party and the more pragmatic, progressive one,” says Verónica Ortiz, a lawyer and co-host on Mexico’s nonpartisan Congress channel. “How this plays out will be extremely important for determining the success of the president and his project.”

The experiences of AMLO’s previous party, the left-leaning Partido de la Revolución Democrática, or PRD, and the conservative Partido Acción Nacional, or PAN, serve as cautionary tales. Each is now much diminished in national and regional representation after becoming mired in internal tribal warfare. Both of the leading candidates for the Morena presidency are pledging to get along with AMLO: in interviews, they try to outdo each other in pledging support for AMLO’s project. Their differences are less about how to run the country than about how to run the party, implement AMLO’s vision, and continue Morena’s electoral success. No matter who wins, as a popular resident, AMLO is likely to exert a greater influence over the party head than vice versa.

The incumbent, Yeidckol Polevnsky, is a longtime leftist who inherited the party’s top spot after AMLO stepped down in 2017 to seek the presidency. Polevnsky got her political start as the PRD’s candidate for governor of the State of Mexico in 2005, running against the eventual victor, Enrique Peña Nieto, who went on to serve as president from 2012 to 2018. His administration was rocked by corruption scandals, economic insecurity, and disappointing growth, which helped fuel Morena’s many victories.

Having led an industrial chamber of commerce before entering politics, she has more recently praised the late Cuban leader Fidel Castro and spoken favorably of Venezuela under Nicolás Maduro. In Mexico, she’s promoted greater state intervention in the economy through projects including a new $8 billion refinery for the national oil company, Petróleos Mexicanos. Polevnsky says her comments on other world leaders are irrelevant to the Morena leadership race and describes the party as a big tent with diverse ideologies. “If you think that I’m a radical, there are people who are much more radical than I am in Morena,” she says. “Ideological or intellectual differences shouldn’t scare us, they should enrich us.”

Polevnsky’s main challenger, lower house majority leader Mario Delgado, studied economics at Mexico’s elite ITAM university alongside others who would become finance ministers in conservative governments. “I’m pragmatic and moderate in the public policies that I support to achieve objectives, but I’m radical in the vision for change,” he says, which includes stamping out corruption and ending poverty.

A Delgado win could signal that Morena will choose more moderate candidates for the key 2021 midterm elections. “There’s space for Delgado to take a more reasonable position, where he tries to influence López Obrador on some issues and might not need to adopt as radical a stance as” Polevnsky, says Alejandro Schtulmann, who heads Mexico City-based political consultancy Empra. “The challenge for the next Morena chair is to consolidate and try to transform a grassroots movement into an institution.”

Yet it isn’t even clear how the party head should be chosen. AMLO said in August that he would like it to be by national poll. An internal party Committee for Honesty and Justice rejected that option. Delgado then suggested that the candidates agree among themselves on rules for a group of polls that would determine the winner, who would simply be ratified by party members at the convention scheduled for Nov. 23-24. Polevnsky says that the party rolls, at 3 million, include more than a million whose party loyalty hasn’t been sufficiently proven.

Martí Batres, a longtime ally of Polevnsky’s and a member of Morena, has already accused Ricardo Monreal, the party’s leader in the Senate, of working with a socially conservative party to oust him as the chamber’s envoy with foreign delegations and other parts of Mexico’s government. Monreal, for his part, says he isn’t taking sides, but some see him backing Delgado’s bid as a way to further his own future presidential aspirations. Batres, meanwhile, had been fired from the local government in Mexico City years earlier by Delgado’s then-boss, current Foreign Minister Marcelo Ebrard, who was mayor of the capital when Delgado was the local finance chief.

A September poll by newspaper El Financiero of 810 Mexican adults showed Delgado and Polevnsky in a statistical tie with 15% and 12% support, respectively. Two other candidates—Alejandro Rojas, a former tourism minister for Mexico City, and Bertha Luján, the comptroller when AMLO was mayor of Mexico City—drew 4% and 3% support, respectively. Two-thirds of those polled said they hadn’t yet chosen a favorite.

Polevnsky has accused Delgado of dividing the party and criticized him for serving in Congress while also campaigning for the party leadership, accusing him of using a taxpayer-financed position as a party launching pad. (Mexican party leaders traditionally haven’t held other elected offices at the same time.) A win for Delgado might also benefit Ebrard. The foreign minister is arguably the Morena politician with the biggest national following after AMLO, and has met with U.S. President Donald Trump and represented AMLO at global forums like the Group of 20 and the United Nations General Assembly. He’s considered an early frontrunner to succeed AMLO as president in 2024.

The infighting caused AMLO to issue a stern warning. “It’s very unfortunate that parties that emerge to defend just causes end up very badly,” he said at a daily news conference in August. “If Morena, the party that I helped to found, rots, not only would I resign from it, but I would ask that it change its name, because that’s the name that gave us the opportunity to bring about the fourth transformation in the public life of this country, and it must not be stained.”

The success of whoever leads the party will be important to maintain the two-thirds majority Morena and its allies have achieved in the lower house, the threshold to make constitutional changes, says Ortiz, the TV political analyst. “That’s the trial by fire that will determine the second half of AMLO’s presidency and set the stage for the next presidential election in 2024. That’s why these disputes and fights within the party are so strong.”
 
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