Politics: Same cast of party players in 2021
Earlier this month electoral authorities gave "thumbs down" to six of the seven parties that had been working for more than a year to meet the requirements to obtain ballot status and public funding for next year’s midterms. Two were the product of competing currents within the national teachers’ union, with others led by lesser known politicians. When it came to deciding their fate, most appeared to be open-and-shut cases involving some combination of failing to register enough members or doing so by improper means, or failing to organize the proper number of state or district assemblies with the necessary number of valid participants, or failing to document the source of registration-campaign contributions or respect the cap on individual donations.
But two cases raised eyebrows and drew considerable debate. That was especially the case of México Libre, the project formed by Margarita Zavala, who along with her husband, ex President Felipe Calderón, led a split from the PAN after she failed in her 2018 bid to win that party’s presidential nomination. The night before the final decision by the National Electoral Institute they appeared to have secured the votes necessary to appear on the 2021 ballot in all federal and local races. But at the last minute, two members of the electoral authority’s national council changed their votes supposedly because they had just been notified of a challenge to the México Libre bid about which they lacked knowledge regarding both its source and content. Whatever their considerations might have been, the effect was to sideline a project that would likely have drained votes away from the country’s main opposition party (PAN). Ultimately, the mystery challenge involved allegations of improper use of a Catholic Church atrium to enroll members.
But while the rules were strictly applied to Zavala’s project, they appeared to have been bent to facilitate the revived ballot status of another party on the right, this one led by evangelicals and with a very different trajectory of alliances. Perhaps the most incongruous entity in President López Obrador’s political coalition was forgiven its violations of secular campaign rules and guaranteed a role in Campaign 2021, leaving almost the exact same cast of parties as in the 2018 elections.
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