This is nothing new, this “modality” has already been applied before, they were even called “kiwi deputies”, because they were dark-skinned on the outside – as that is how they presented themselves on the ballot – but green on the inside. In the last election, the 4T parties tried a new “exotic fruit”, the chicozapote, since they were green candidates on the outside but Morena-like in content.
Of the group detected, 17 virtual elected deputies are Morena members, but they disguised themselves as green candidates and six snuck in as if they were from the PT, so that in total 23 Morena members took the nominations of their allies. Meanwhile, one from the PVEM and two PT members presented themselves wearing maroon caps.
In a separate case, in the opposition, the INE detected another cachirul, but this one a militant of the Institutional Revolutionary Party (PRI) who ran and won his election wearing the National Action Party (PAN) cap.
An old “trick”
The nomination of candidates who are members of one party but affiliated with another is not unusual and is in fact a strategy used in 2012 and 2015 by the PRI with its former allies the PVEM (the so-called “watermelon deputies”, green on the outside but red on the inside) and Nueva Alianza (Panal).
In 2018, the model was copied –and massively- by Morena and its allies the PT and Encuentro Social (PES), and it was repeated in 2021 by Morena, PT and the PVEM, with which three years earlier there was only a legislative coalition that evolved into an electoral one.
In all cases, the intention of nominating cachirules was to circumvent controls and achieve overrepresentation in the Chamber of Deputies: by appearing with fewer deputies than those actually won, the tricolor and then Morena, were able to enjoy 8% overrepresentation of federal deputies.
But today, although this trick to achieve over-representation is no longer in use, since the National Electoral Institute (INE) detects them and they are already counted to the party to which the winning candidate is affiliated for the purposes of assigning plurinominal deputies, for electoral experts the desire for control has not changed, but the tactics, so going in Coalition is the plan, not to increase the potential votes, but to evade controls.
In return, allies who agree to subsume are rewarded with more deputies and more resources for their benches.
Sergio Bárcena, director of the Parliamentary Bureau, explains it this way:
“The strategy is to go in coalition. If Morena had competed alone, it would have won 49% of the seats alone… going in coalition allows Morena 8% of overrepresentation, for the PVEM another 8% and for the Labor Party (PT) another 8% and guarantees Morena control over two more benches and their surpluses,” he explains.
He explains that with this “modality” neither Morena, nor Verde nor PT violate that 8%, “but if you add it up, that coalition is overrepresented.
“The coalition was formed in order to have more seats, without winning more districts,” he points out.
The strategy could be summed up by dividing into three parties what actually operates as a single force, because the electoral specialist Said Hernandez explains that the parties of the so-called “Fourth Transformation” are, in legislative terms, one and the same.
“What is new is not that they move from one party to another, but that it does not matter which one they are in or where they migrate to: they operate as one.
“Before, there was a sharp division, with each party having its seats and each party scratching itself with its nails. Now, Morena is so strong that the PVEM and the PT are not real partisan actors in Congress. The three are acting as a unitary block,” he reinforces.
Evidence that it is considered a single block, a single force, is that the Secretary of the Interior, Luisa María Alcalde, has presented on two occasions in the morning conference a slide of the legislators of the 4T that her party will have in the next legislature.
(Photo: Cuartoscuro/ Daniel Augusto)
