Politics: Complicated path to an effective opposition bloc

MEXICO - Report 22 Jun 2020 by Guillermo Valdes and Francisco González

For all practical effects the opening salvo in the electoral competition that will conclude with voters going to the polls on June 6, 2021, has already been fired as President Andrés Manuel López Obrador has launched a strategy to reposition his image and policies. He has spent the last two weeks touring the country to promote his pet projects and even more time honing his attacks on all potential sources of opposition, real or imagined, to his 4T, including the decision to publicly display an apocryphal document calling for the formation of a broad opposition bloc (Broad Opposition Bloc, or BOA) .

The president must be aware that, given the extent to which the country’s economy is deteriorating and the pandemic continues to rage, there is a real risk that his National Renovation Movement (Morena) and allied parties might could fail to defend their majority in the lower house of Congress next year, much less expand the number of state governors allied with his administration.

Aside from its own incompetence and failed policies, the biggest potential threat to AMLO’s ability to tighten his grip on all levels of public administration would be if the country’s badly weakened opposition parties can build a broad competing bloc next year, with significant social and economic actors.

The political and practical obstacles to such a broad union are formidable. Clearly there is great interest in such a possibility among numerous civil society personalities and organizations, as well as major business figures and associations, but it will take a lot of patience and dedication to build common working relations and winning strategies for such a bloc to emerge, especially for a coalition that could have relevant victories in 2021. With only five months left before such an alliance and candidacies must be legally registered, none of the three parties that might contribute their ballot status, resources and electoral expertise have explicitly committed to such a project.

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