The ruling Morena party – with which President López Obrador swept to power in 2018 – is easily Mexico’s most popular political party, a new poll found.
In a survey conducted earlier this week, the polling company Poligrama asked 1,000 people to offer an opinion on seven political parties.
The National Regeneration Movement, or Morena – founded by López Obrador as a civil society organization in 2011 before becoming a political party in 2014 – was the only party that was seen in a positive light by a majority of respondents.
Just under 42% of those polled said they had an excellent opinion of Morena while just over 19% said they had a good opinion of the party. A combined 61% of respondents assessed Morena positively, well above the rate for the other six parties.
Poligrama said the high rating was related to López Obrador’s high personal approval rating, which was almost 67% in its latest poll.
The poll comes almost a year after a midterm federal election at which Morena lost its majority in the lower house of Congress and the two-thirds supermajority it shared with its allies. However, the ruling party attracted more support than any other party, garnering about 35% of the total vote.
The National Action Party (PAN), the main opposition party in terms of representation in Congress, was assessed as excellent by just over 12% of poll respondents and good by 11%. Almost 51% of those polled said they had a terrible opinion of the conservative party, compared to just 24% who said the same about Morena.
Just over 14% of respondents said they had a bad opinion of the PAN – which ruled Mexico between 2000 and 2012 under presidents Vicente Fox and Felipe Calderón – while the figure for Morena was just over 9%.
Morena’s net rating (positive opinions minus negative opinions) was + 27.4% while the PAN’s was – 41.47%.
About one in 20 respondents didn’t offer an opinion about Morena while more than one in 10 didn’t say what they thought about the PAN.
The Institutional Revolutionary Party (PRI), which ruled Mexico for most of the 20th century and the six years before López Obrador took office, had a net rating that was even worse than the PAN at -42.2%.
The poor result suggests that the once omnipotent PRI is still damaged by the six scandal-filled years that former president Enrique Peña Nieto was in office.
Fewer than 11% of respondents assessed the party as excellent, about 9% said it was good, almost 14% rated it as bad and nearly 49% said it was terrible. The PRI, which has a loose alliance with the PAN and the Democratic Revolution Party (PRD), has the third highest number of lawmakers in federal Congress.
The net ratings for the other four parties were -45.2% for the leftist PRD, López Obrador’s former party; -25.88% for the Labor Party, a Morena ally; -42.19% for the Ecological Green Party of Mexico, which also supports Morena in Congress; and -18.09% for the Citizens Movement (MC) party, which has two state governors in Enrique Alfaro of Jalisco and Samuel García of Nuevo León.
That means that MC was the second most popular party among the Poligrama poll respondents while simultaneously being very unpopular.
The publication of the survey comes ahead of gubernatorial elections in six states early next month. Voters in Aguascalientes, Durango, Hidalgo, Oaxaca, Quintana Roo and Tamaulipas will go to the polls on June 5.
Morena currently governs 16 federal entities including Mexico City, and will be looking to add to that total next month. The PAN rules seven states while the PRI governs three.
The next presidential election will be held in 2024. López Obrador, who sets the political agenda at his marathon weekday press conferences, cannot be reelected. He received about 90% support at last month’s “revocation of mandate” recall referendum, but voter turnout was low.
With reports from EFE
