Politics: Hurdles to a Broad Opposition Front

MEXICO - Report 19 Jul 2017 by Guillermo Valdes and Esteban Manteca

The national leaderships of the PAN and PRD continue to press for a broad opposition front for next year’s elections after seeing, yet again, that the PRI’s electoral victories in June were made possible by opposition parties' competing against one another in crucial gubernatorial contests.

Polls suggest the PAN is the party currently best positioned to win next year’s presidential race, but if it were to lead a coalition that included not only the PRD, but also some minor parties (the MC and Panal among the most likely), it would be a much more formidable force for turning the PRI out of office, stopping López Obrador and his Morena party from coming to power, and building the sort of stable majority in Congress essential to enacting its agenda.

Such alliances anchored by the PAN and PRD, and often by defections of major politicians from the PRI, have proven highly successful in recent years in a number of contests at the state and municipal levels, including last month in Nayarit and Veracruz.

The PRI will obviously do everything in its power to frustrate such coalition building, but many other hurdles could also stand in the way. The project would have to entail an election platform sufficiently generic to skirt the important differences separating the PAN and the PRD, especially on social and cultural issues (equal marriage, abortion, etc.), and some issues in the Pact for Mexico agenda, such as energy reform. Yet the platform would have to be sufficiently concrete to provide the common candidacy a clear identity and message, one that could appeal to the many voters who have become deeply suspicious of all parties and politicians. It would also have to be seen as viable on crucial points such as fighting corruption, a new political reform, rebuilding the country’s security and justice institutions, and improving the government’s delivery of public services.

Such a grand coalition is by no means out of the question, but with the clock ticking, it does not yet look like a probability.

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