A Love Letter to the Right (or Farewell) / The "Fourth Transformation"

A Love Letter to the Right (or Farewell) / The "Fourth Transformation"

By: Erreh Svaia

Caprine Dispersion

Previously I pointed out that the appointment of José Antonio Meade as candidate for the presidency of the republic by the PRI, became the clearest "love letter" of the once hegemonic (and once pseudo leftist) party to the PAN or to the center right, after the transformations deep that the party suffered in 1982, when the country was left bankrupt, after two six year periods known as the "tragic dozen", with two pseudo-leftist populists, Luis Echeverría and José López Portillo, the derailment of the so-called "revolutionary nationalism" and the turning point of the party, definitive in 1988, that would create a break within the PRI, with the subsequent creation of the PRD (with two caudillos as their leaders for almost 30 years, not so “D” emocratic), leading that old displaced current of the PRI, added to socialist and minor communist parties, the candidacy and subsequent triumph of candidate Carlos Salinas of Gortari would imply a strong break within the party, a reorientation towards the so-called "social liberalism" in which the dismantling of the obsessive state apparatus, in addition to the orientation to the free market, crowned with the beginning of the Free Trade Agreement (NAFTA), would start a trip of the PRI to the right, a political and economic vision that sought in some way to integrate itself into the dynamics of the PAN , which already seemed to begin to exert a strong influence as an opposition, which would be crowned with the triumph of this party in the presidential elections of the year 2000, two administrations of the PAN, and one of return of the PRI, more towards the center right than ever, to charge of Enrique Peña Nieto, overshadowed by corruption issues and by the continuation of the violence that appeared in a brutal manner in the previous administration, culminating in Peña Nieto's complicated decision to appoint Meade as the candidate of the party, a candidate who It did not belong to the PRI and that it had been part of previous administrators of the PAN, it is understandable that before this "new turn" and practically "declaration of love” from a part of the PRI towards the PAN, would bring as a consequence a new rupture within the PRI.

Andrés López, current president-elect of the country, would point out at various times during his almost 18 years of campaign, the need for a "fourth transformation" within the country, López, a former member of the PRI and the PRD, would break with the first during the division of 1988, and later it would leave the PRD before the impossibility of imposing his own vision to the one of the "currents" existing within this one, would form its party called Morena, taking great part of the militants of the PRD related to the center, leaving in a precarious situation to that party that sought to "reorient" the PRI, return to the "left" and transform itself into a modern party more oriented toward social democracy, with intense battles within it that would make this transformation complex between the old caudillismo inherited from the PRI, and some iconoclastic ideologues such as Agustín Basave who was already looking for a broad alliance between the left and the right in the style of those existing in countries like Chile or Germany.

We saw a PRI fall apart during the elections of last July, a PRI divided again and with some of its worst results in history, a large number of party deserters who apparently sought a return to the idyllic past of the party, in the fact that the president became the all-powerful leader of the political apparatus, the once called "imperial presidency", the submission and total obedience to the supreme command of the party (the president), in exchange for the possibility of climbing the ranks of posts, it would seem that the "Old PRI", the one who broke with the party in 1988 and who migrated to the PRD, made a new transformation towards Morena in a sort of "Make PRI Great Again", or "Make Old PRI Great Again", that command almost imperial, that party that integrates all the currents to the purest corporatist style and that in fact has only used the "left" as a mask of certain social attractiveness, difficult to speak of Morena as a progressive party or leftist vanguards when the main premise is austerity to the faithfully letter, as it is styled in countries like Germany, impossible to speak of a progressive government when the main strategy unveiled has been to lower government spending and not to create a new tax logic, in what seems to be a clear wink to the most conservative right, which explains the appeal exercised towards some of the most conservative members of the PAN, who left their party to join the López platform; New PRI seems to be torn apart and with difficult options to reinvent itself, meanwhile, the old PRI seems to have finally regenerated, that dissidence separated from the party in 1988 and heir of the PRI “caudillista” generated by Lázaro Cárdenas, seems to have resumed its course and returned to the life in Morena and in Lopez, the illusion of the left, as has always happened with the PRI, is again a social hook, an electoral ruse, after all, after the so-called "revolutionary nationalism" of the PNR, later PRM and designated by Cárdenas, like the PRI, seems to enter into his so-called "fourth transformation" as Morena, it is an almost ironic twist that a large part of Mexican society has decided to return to its "cage of melancholy", as described by Roger Bartra, to an idyllic past that never really existed, to a supposed security and certainty in exchange for their liberties, as Marx said "History repeats itself, first as a tragedy and then as a farce ", and it seems that we do not learn and our short memory continues to sabotage us.