Divide and Conquer in México

Divide and Conquer in México

By: Erreh Svaia

“Divide and rule, the politician cries; Unite and lead, is watchword of the wise.”

Johann Wolfgang von Goethe

It's no surprise that the PRI and president Enrique Peña Nieto don’t look worried about the presidential race about to happen in the next two years on the road to 2018 election, in which a new Mexican president will be elected for the next six years.

Considering that three major political forces have more or less defined it's potential candidates, for the PAN, the right wing party, Margarita Zavala, wife of former president Felipe Calderón, and a longtime active member of the political party, Miguel Ángel Mancera, chief of the government of México City, and potential candidate for the left wing party PRD, and a third candidate, and perhaps the most obvious one is Morena's Andrés López, who will become a third time candidate,  running know for the country´s far left wing party.

The big challenge for this next election might be the arrival of the so called "independent" candidates, ignited long time ago by Jorge Castañeda, and popularized these days by Jaime Rodríguez, Nuevo León's "independent" governor, the two of them hold the key to independent candidates future, although there are some claims that independent candidates could be a new strategy by the government for the fragmentation of the opposition and that's perhaps why the PRI is exuding so much confidence about the presidential future, given the fact that the PRI has a strong hold on the so called "hard vote", meaning the vote of bureaucracy and unions assuring (and that of satellite parties PVEM and PANAL) them at least 30% of the votes, leaving the rest of the five possible candidates with a mere 70% of the voters, mathematically speaking each of them could aspire to 14% of the voters and no more, making it impossible for them to defeat the official political party machine.

The PRI is happy to let "independent" candidates and  extreme populists like Andrés López on the competition, as they just help them to divide opposition even more, and "cannibalize" votes themselves, if opposition really wants to defeat the official party this time, they should think about an unusual alliance, thinking out if the box ad realizing that only the two second major political parties PAN and PRD could attempt such feat, perhaps even needing an iconoclast coalition with an independent candidate, thus qualifying to gather at least a potential 42% of the vote in order to represent a really danger for the PRI permanence in the power.

Will the figure of the second round, key to the big defeat of Peronism in Argentina finally appear on the Mexican electorate system? If opposition wants to defeat the “hard vote” is imperative for this initiative to start happening in order to create union against the official political party, who could also use “puppet candidates” in its satellite parties in order to pulverize even more opposition votes.