Politics: Potential Shakeups for 2018 Scenarios

MEXICO - Report 11 Sep 2017 by Guillermo Valdes and Esteban Manteca

The first hours of the fall session of Congress got off to a rocky start as internal factional strife in one party became enmeshed in a broader dispute over whether the current attorney general would continue to preside over the prosecutorial branch of the criminal justice system for the next nine years. Underpinning that debate and some key procedural matters are calculations on all sides regarding the 2018 elections.

Even as the PAN, PRD and MC parties took their first steps toward formalizing the idea of a broad opposition front (BOF) for next year’s elections, the PRI helped to intensify internecine warfare by electing as the presiding officer in the upper chamber a dissident PAN senator who backs the presidential aspirations of Margarita Zavala over those of PAN National Chairman Ricardo Anaya, who has been the target of a media campaign allegedly orchestrated by the PRI to insinuate that Anaya had used past government posts to facilitate questionable business dealings.

With PAN officials talking of expelling the dissident senator along with other Zavala backers, and Los Pinos working to politically weaken Anaya and his BOF plans, the PRI appeared to have made progress in its broader effort to keep the opposition in as much disarray as possible. It increased the likelihood of a split in the PAN that could lead Zavala to launch a presidential campaign of her own and potentially seal the BOF’s fate. The main beneficiaries of such a development would be the PRI, but also Andrés Manuel López Obrador, who is ahead in the polls along with his Morena party, but that party appears to have suffered its first high-profile split. Ricardo Monreal has not formalized his break with the party after being passed over for the Mexico City mayoral nomination, but he appears to be actively exploring the possibility of becoming the PRI or PRD candidate instead, potentially taking his formidable social base and political machine with him, and possibly undermining Morena’s lead in the Mexico City contest.

The developments of the past two weeks underscore just how volatile political scenarios remain, and just how wide open the 2018 campaign remains.

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