Mexico’s governing party ‘lost its values’

MEXICO CITY: As Mexico prepares for the first of three presidential candidate debates, the governing party is struggling to remain relevant in the campaign ahead of the July 1 election.

Adverts for Institutional Revolutionary Party candidate Jose Antonio Meade have dropped the party’s logo. Instead they use three coloured triangles meant to represent the parties in his coalition.

That decision makes sense given the striking unpopularity of the ruling party, known as the PRI.

In a face-to-face poll of 1 200 voters published on Wednesday by the newspaper Reforma, 59% said their most important goal in the election was to get PRI out of office.

At the same time, 22% said they wanted to prevent the race’s front-runner, leftist Andres Manuel Lopez Obrador, from reaching the presidency.

The poll had a margin of error of four percentage points. Meade “is doing the best he can”.

“He has a mission impossible, because the rejection of the PRI is now brutal, it’s enormous”, said Jose Antonio Crespo, a political analyst at Mexico’s Centre for Economic Research and Teaching.

“He has some strong points, he’s been a good official, he has a more or less friendly demeanor,” Crespo added. “But he is carrying the weight of the party.”

With a half-dozen former PRI governors under indictment for corruption and uncountable scandals over its decades in power, the PRI seemed to realise that one of its own couldn’t win.

So the party nominated Meade, a former cabinet official who isn’t formally a member of the party.

But he has been running a very heavily party-oriented campaign, negating the advantage.

Ricardo Anaya, who is No 2 in the polls as the candidate for a left-right coalition, has discounted Meade. “The PRI is already on its way out. The question is what kind of change do you want,” he said.

Anaya, 39, casts himself as the change of the future. He frequently casts himself as sort of a tech guru launching new “smart” products – and says Obrador represents Mexico’s old, statist past.

The problem is that most Mexicans, particularly those under 40, don’t remember living under the old, state-dominated economy that characterised Mexico prior to 1982.

And Obrador, paradoxically, has benefited from an old tactic of the PRI: dividing the opposition.

There is a strong contingent of voters who don’t want to see him win, but they are divided between the four other candidates, who include two running as independents.

“Many things could happened between now and July 1,” columnist Raymundo Riva Palacio wrote.

“He could go to the extreme and say something so shrill everyone may hear it.” – AP