A new opposition needs to be built in seven months to take on the ruling Morena party at upcoming elections, the national leader of the Citizens Movement (MC) party said Wednesday.
Senator Dante Delgado, a former governor of Veracruz and ambassador to Italy, proposed the creation of an opposition movement that is above political parties, although he indicated that the MC will have a central role in building it.
“We believe that the new opposition has to be built in a maximum of seven months and we’re sure that it will be above parties, and it will have to be … [formed by] actors who are truly representative of society,” he told a press conference in the Senate.
“… I have no doubt that there will be a new opposition in Mexico” by the end of January 2023, Delgado said.
Gubernatorial elections will be held in México state and Coahuila next June, while voters will go to the polls in June 2024 to elect a new president, federal deputies and senators, governors in nine states and many other state and municipal representatives.
Speaking three days after Morena won four of six governorships up for grabs at elections last Sunday, Delgado said the existing opposition movement – a loose electoral alliance between the National Action Party (PAN), the Institutional Revolutionary Party (PRI) and the Democratic Revolution Party (PRD) – is inefficient and hasn’t had electoral success.
“We’re building a project for the country, the option Mexico is demanding,” he said. “It’s been seen over and over again that the project that the historic forces have been building is inefficient, it hasn’t had electoral success and we’re going for electoral victory.”
Delgado also said that President López Obrador “knows very well” that MC is building a new opposition to win the presidency in 2024.
He said Mexicans are looking for a political force that can tackle the problems the country faces, such as poverty and insecurity. Delgado also said that citizens want economic development that will generate the kind of jobs new generations of workers want to do. The current government has failed in “practically all areas,” he charged.
He said earlier this week that the MC wouldn’t join the PAN-PRI-PRD alliance – called Va por México – because the leaders of those parties are trying to “revive something that has already failed.”
The senator said Wednesday that his party has made a commitment to contest elections on its own, but left himself some wriggle room, asserting that “we’re not ruling anyone in or out” when pushed to declare whether it would ally itself with any opposition party at the 2024 presidential election.
Senator Ricardo Monreal, Morena’s leader in the upper house of Congress, predicted that the MC will ultimately join the Va por México alliance.
“Notwithstanding that the national [MC] leader has said no [to the possibility of joining Va por México], I think that in the end the three-party bloc and Citizens Movement will work together in 2024, not just to be competitive but to survive,” he said Tuesday.
“…They’re going to come together, it’s the only way they can be competitive with Morena,” Monreal said. “… Even with the four [parties] there is no way they can beat Morena,” he added.
The results of a recent El Universal poll suggested that Morena will easily win the 2024 presidential election if it nominates either Mexico City Mayor Claudia Sheinbaum or Foreign Affairs Minister Marcelo Ebrard. While one of those two is considered most likely to become Morena’s candidate, a dominant opposition flag bearer hasn’t yet emerged.
Jalisco Governor Enrique Alfaro, who won the 2018 election in that state on an MC ticket, could feasibly head up a new opposition built by Citizens Movement, although an obstacle to electoral success could be that he is not well known outside Jalisco, as the El Universal survey found.
He declared late last year that he was “more than prepared” to be a presidential candidate in 2024, but denied being on a personal quest to take the reins of the country and asserted that he doesn’t have “delusions of grandeur.”
With reports from El Universal and Milenio
