John M Ackerman
AND
This Sunday, 5th June elections will be held in six states: Aguascalientes, Durango, Hidalgo, Oaxaca, Tamaulipas and Quintana Roo. If the candidates championed by the Morena party win in all six contests, Andrés Manuel López Obrador’s party will end up absolutely dominating the national electoral board. Today, Morena, together with her allies from the Green Party, already govern 18 states. With six more, the official party would have control over 24 entities, leaving the PAN with only four, the PRI with two and the MC with another two.
In 2023 there will be elections in the two entities still poorly governed by the PRI: Coahuila and the state of Mexico. There is a high probability that these two states will finally taste the honeys of alternation after 90 years of a single party. Thus, Morena would arrive at the 2024 presidential elections with 26 of the 32 states in the stock market.
The only exceptions would be the PAN bastions in Guanajuato, Querétaro, Chihuahua and Yucatán, as well as the states of Jalisco and Nuevo León, today commanded by the neoliberal populists Enrique Alfaro and Samuel García of the anti-citizen movement.
Obama never had this level of territorial political control, as the classic would say. In fact, no political party has governed so many states since the old days when the PRI served as almost the only state party. This annihilation of Morena’s electoral rivals would imply the definitive consolidation of the first stage of the Fourth Transformation of the Republic.
We should celebrate this historic conquest, but at the same time prepare ourselves to face the enormous challenges of the second stage. After the electoral victories, comes the hard work of governing without corruption and in favor of the interests of the people. After the mobilization of the voters, the urgent task of building a party and promoting social organization from the bases is imposed.
The inertia of our political system is capitalized and there is a palpable risk that Morena will become a new PRI. For example, the carrying of militants is increasingly common in the party’s electoral events and mobilizations. To reach the broad calls that were previously achieved strictly from conviction and social emotion, today more and more money and blackmail are used. In this way, the principles of the movement are being worn down and the old political culture of clientelism and the exchange of favors is being reproduced.
Another vice of the old system that is beginning to rear its head is the subordination of the party to the government. Despite the fact that López Obrador has pointed out time and time again that we must avoid at all costs the construction of a new PRI-style state party, many party leaders and government officials act as if Morena should be one more arm of municipal governments, state or federal.
A third PRI vice that endangers Morena’s original project as a democratic and popular party-movement is the demand to comply in silence the line
of leaders, as well as the tendency to silence internal critics. For example, the official newspaper of the party, Regeneration, is limited to publishing propaganda texts in favor of the policies of the federal government (https://morena.si/regeneration/). She is undoubtedly an important work in the context of the violent onslaught of fake news from the right. However, this important medium would also have to open its pages to a healthy internal debate on the character and destiny of the political party of the Fourth Transformation.
It was very symbolic, for example, that recently two founders of the movement with different views on the current situation of the party, Epigmenio Ibarra and yours truly, had to resort to the microphones of a staunch opponent, Ciro Gómez Leyva, to exchange our opinions (https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=m1LLN6pJ25A). They say that The laundry is washed at home
. However, this is only possible when there is a house within which the urgent cleaning tasks can be carried out.
If we want the second stage of the Fourth Transformation to be even brighter than the first, so that the culmination of López Obrador’s six-year term does not leave us orphans and without a helmsman, we must begin now with the urgent task of strengthening this historical process not only in the government, but also in the party and in society.
No particular leader or candidate will be able to fill López Obrador’s shoes. Only the active participation of all will allow us to move from electoral victories to the revolution of consciences, an urgent task before the glorious project of the Fourth Transformation sinks under the weight of the bureaucrats and the grasshoppers They only seek to satisfy their own interests.
