Politics: A presidential campaign that wasn’t as MC’s García bid implodes, providing some breathing space for Xóchitl

MEXICO - Report 11 Dec 2023 by Guillermo Valdes and Francisco González

The late October decision by Nuevo León Governor Samuel García to act on his presidential nomination from the MC party and begin campaigning for the country’s highest office sparked a seemingly farcical series of events that, in retrospect, appear to have been entirely predictable. At least for the moment, the events have left the presidential contest largely as it had been prior to the MC debacle in Nuevo León, a state into which Mexico’s Supreme Court was eventually forced to get involved.

It had taken an unpredictable series of events in 2021 to hand the MC only its second governor’s mansion in history, but García was immediately left facing a state congress dominated by the PRI and PAN, with whom he has constantly fought. His bungling efforts to do an end-run around the local legislature’s prerogative to choose the person who would take over during his absence to campaign for the presidency saw him hit the campaign trail ever so briefly, only to return to office, make one last doomed attempt to appoint his temporary replacement over the one chosen by the state legislature and then definitively abandon his campaign, but only after an interlude in which the state had two rival sitting governors.

MC Head Dante Delgado soon lashed out at the PRI and PAN for frustrating his party’s best opportunity to mount what could have been a campaign capable of making the party a major player nationally while siphoning off votes from the opposition nominee Xóchitl Gálvez. He even announced that the MC was abandoning its alliance in Congress with the PAN, PRI and PRD to block AMLO’s reform agenda. It is not yet clear if the rest of his party will follow his lead on this point and whether part of the organization will actively support Xóchitl next year.

This week we analyze the extent to which both the MC and AMLO emerged as losers from this confrontation and what implications it holds for the 2024 elections and López Obrador’s reform agenda.

Now read on...

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