Politics: The fight over Morena’s future
The governing National Regeneration Movement (Morena) party will elect a new national leadership when 3,000 delegates meet in late November. Four people are competing to become the party’s next president. The winner will wield enormous influence over candidate selection and campaign finance in future elections, and ultimately in choosing who will succeed Andrés Manuel López Obrador as the party’s presidential nominee. But they will also be in a position to shape the very identity and political project of an organization whose extremely heterogeneous political composition betrays the extent to which it is defined first and foremost by AMLO’s charisma and political coattails.
While Morena defines itself as “a broad, plural and inclusive political organization on the left,” it is less a political party with a clearly defined ideology and program representing a specific sector of society, and much more, as its name suggests, a sort of social movement. Its claims to a “left” character belie the fact that while there may even be hard-line defenders of the dictatorial regimes of Cuba, Venezuela and North Korea, the party has accepted within its ranks right-wing politicians who migrated from the PAN, former members of the PRI holding a wide range of political positions, corrupt union bosses, and even politicians associated with former President Enrique Peña Nieto. As long as everyone recognizes López Obrador as the absolute leader of the organization, it can dispense with any clear ideology and program and include not only far-left currents and social organizations, but also career politicians with more mainstream ideas and roots in more centrist and conservative parties, and others from the far-right end of the political spectrum.
The struggle between the left and more centrist elements in the organization has been playing out for some time in fights over the party’s nominees for public office and policies in Congress, for example, but now boils down to a direct battle over the control of an organization in which López Obrador appears to at least be pretending to play less and less of a role. He has declared that he is staying out of the leadership contest and has ordered all government officials to do the same, under threat of dismissal. And further complicating matters, there is no agreement as to just how the next leader is to be chosen, and there are significant barriers to all the methods currently being proposed.
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