The historic PRI is already irrelevant in Mexico

The elections held in Mexico on Sunday, June 2, yielded such a large result for the young government party, Morena, that they themselves must have been surprised. The president-elect, Claudia Sheinbaum, was expected to win with an advantage, but perhaps not so much that they would achieve the enormous majority that they have achieved in the legislative chambers. This is where we can see the critical situation that the Institutional Revolutionary Party is going through, the PRI that governed Mexico for seven decades as the only option, that of the tricolor flag. Mexico was the PRI and the PRI was Mexico, a perfect dictatorship, as Nobel Prize winner Vargas Llosa rightly described it. In the recent elections, the PRI has obtained just over 5.4 million votes, less than 10%, with a participation of 60% of the 98 million voters, which translates into around 34 deputies out of a total of 500 , the fifth force in that Chamber, and 17 senators, the third place. The data has not been completely finalized yet and these days the party is working hard to recount the minutes to win some more seats, which will in no way change its weak result.

“The situation is critical, very delicate, their decline has been consistent for years, we cannot be surprised, last year they lost the State of Mexico,” says Dulce María Sauri, 72 years old, a member of the party, who was president of its National Council and member of the Political Council. She has been a legislator, governor in Yucatán and president of the Chamber of Deputies. She mentions the State of Mexico because it has always been the great bastion of the party and the birthplace of several presidents. The last candidate they had for the governorship in that entity, Alejandra del Moral, has just switched to Morena and her predecessor, Governor Alfredo del Mazo, expelled from the party a week ago as a “traitor”, they accused the management. The PRI barely retains two states out of 32, Durango and Coahuila.

In July of last year, a group of senators, including some historic ones, left the party due to disagreements with the leadership and 320 PRI members left with them. No one seems capable of stopping the bleeding that is draining the party, with many of its members wearing the shirts of other political formations. One of the senators who abandoned that day was Claudia Ruiz Massieu, daughter of a murdered historical leader. In one of the noble rooms of the party’s immense national headquarters, a kind of National Socialist bunker, Ruiz Massieu’s painting has already been taken down. She was general secretary and then president between 2017 and 2019, and minister under Enrique Peña Nieto.

After the triumph of Peña Nieto in 2012, after two six-year governments of the National Action party (PAN), the PRI lived the illusion of a return to the political scene, but the great victory of the current president, Andrés Manuel López Obrador, in 2018 , gave them a blow of reality from which they have not recovered. The strength exhibited by Morena and the decline of the PRI configure in Mexico a kind of new party system, a kind of transition. Instead of going out to look for a diagnosis and its medicine, the party began a new presidency under the controversial figure of Alejandro Moreno, the famous Alito, as they call him, and a statutory change “that concentrated power and prevented collegiate decisions from being made.” holds Dulce María Sauri. Alito’s period, which did not know how to preserve his native state, Campeche, is close to its end, but he has not yet set a date for it. Quite the contrary, these days he works tirelessly with the electoral ballots to find lost votes that will add some cattle to his flock. He has not resigned, on the contrary, he placed himself on the lists to obtain an undisputed seat in the Senate, the same as other opposition leaders have done. The PRI is not the only party in crisis, but it is the one that “accumulates historical debts with the Mexican people,” says Sauri and mentions the wasted opportunity with the citizens, “between corruption and frivolity,” of the Peña Nieto government. “Today the party is irrelevant,” she adds, although she retains a hint of optimism.

The “successful economic performance and the outstanding political stability that the party provided” in 20th century Mexico, coupled with a country that had not yet known the violence that now bled it, are the circumstances that sowed tolerance with this party, mentions Rogelio. Hernández, professor at the College of Mexico, well versed in Mexican political reality and author of Minimal history of the Institutional Revolutionary Party. “It wasn’t desirable, but it wasn’t reprehensible either,” she says. The PRI governments “accumulated social, political and economic conflicts in the seventies and concentrated the worst political practices, which generated enormous discredit” that persists today. It is the party most rejected by citizens in all surveys, far ahead of the others. “The PAN made mistakes, but they could have been due to some extent to their inexperience, or that is how citizens saw it,” something that could not justify the attitude of the hegemonic PRI. Hernández mentions the last PRI government, that of Peña Nieto, as a last drowning kick: “It was not entirely bad on an economic level, but it suffered from political inexperience, corruption and frivolity,” which finally led to the dark night of Iguala, with the disappearance of 43 normalista students in Guerrero, an unresolved issue that continues to lash out at all governments. The Ayotzinapa case is mentioned by many as the beginning of the end of the PRI. Peña Nieto ended his government with very low levels of popularity.

Excessive confidence, ignorance to read the enormous Mexican diversity from north to south that some of its leaders or governing cadres have expressed, political incompetence and arrogance, as well as the bad reputation and its sole bet on PAN failures, are some of the causes that were wearing him down, according to Hernández, and that gave way to López Obrador’s overwhelming victory. From then on, everything that Morena was gaining was lost by the PRI and it has not raised its head again. Like energy, the PRI is neither created nor destroyed, it only transforms, say some in Mexico, and they see in the hegemonic majorities of the current party in Government a reissue of the old system of revolutionary nationalism, “with its clientelistic populist practices and the old principle that the State only serves to benefit those most in need,” says Professor Hernández. Like communicating vessels, where Morena bathes in crowds, the PRI is now only “testimonial.”

What remains of those bonfires of PRI vanity, however, are not just ashes. Although he is losing political muscle in spurts, his political weight street by street cannot yet be completely underestimated. He still maintains networks of chieftains in neighborhoods that move the vote. It is not dead, and it may endure, but it has lost, Hernández maintains, its capacity to recycle in the leadership and recruit militants, something that the PAN retains, perhaps called to nuclear the opposition in a country that seems to be heading towards a two-party system. If López Obrador eliminates from the electoral system, as he has proposed, multi-member candidacies, which are achieved without political affiliation and without standing for election and bring together a certain social plurality in the Chambers, it could be a final fatal blow for the PRI as a minority party in that is becoming, explains Hernández.

“The PRI was never a classic, traditional political party, it was rather a way of doing politics,” begins Otto Granados, who was Secretary of Education with Peña Nieto, and in this he also compares it with Morena, who, “like his own As the name suggests, it is more of a movement than an organic party, which is why many PRI families have ended up there,” he says. Among the causes of the sustained decline, Granados mentions “the immaturity of the PRI to become an autonomous party that does not depend on presidential decisions. The leadership has made the mistake of believing that electoral effectiveness derives from control of the apparatus. The electorate is outside,” but the PRI seems to have lost connection with the citizens.

What is the ideology of a party that was practically unique in the political spectrum? They all fit, the most conservative and the most progressive, passing through the center. And that is one of the reasons why in Mexico the left and the right as they are understood in other places have a diffuse character here. It is a country more of leaders than of ideological parties yet. However, Morena has been taking over the programmatic bases of the left and PANism those of the right. In that sandwich, the PRI appears even more blurred. “And without the ability to read a very diverse Mexico, with a population of average age in their 30s, educated, urbanized. “He has not known how to choose more moderate strategies and focus the new discourse,” says Granados as examples of what he could do to survive and face the future.

Dulce María Sauri also wants to talk about the future. Although she maintains that she could disappear in the 2030 elections, she is not giving up. But to do this, he explains, “we must face a true resignification of the party, which does not involve changing its name”, as other formations have proposed, at risk of losing political registration, something that will happen when they do not reach 3% of the votes. . She accuses the party leadership of taking over the positions in the candidates for the Chambers, for themselves and for their supporters. “We must change the way we have walked in recent years, there are young people who can do it, face reality with modesty and before rethinking whether we walk alone or in coalition with other forces, like now, we have to fix our own house,” defend. Before ending the telephone conversation, Sauri will say: “We must free the PRI, even if its Political Council clings to the leadership tooth and nail. But I believe in miracles.”

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