A former president describes Andrés Manuel López Obrador’s fourth transformation of Mexico as little more than a new face of the Institutional Revolutionary Party, or PRI.

Felipe Calderón Hinojosa said the phrase “fourth transformation” was “pretentious.”

” . . . It looks more like the fourth transformation of PRI . . . it’s the fourth transformation of a regime that has done a lot of damage to Mexico,” said the ex-president, who escalated the war on drugs, one of the bloodiest chapters in the nation’s history, during his term between 2006 and 2012.

Mexico’s first three transformations were independence from Spain, the 19th-century liberal reform known as La Reforma and the Mexican Revolution.

Calderón made the comments during an interview with broadcaster Grupo Fórmula, at which he confirmed he might seek to create a new political party next year that would act as a counterweight to the new government.

A longtime member of the conservative National Action Party (PAN), his loyalty — and that of many other party members — was shaken by the party’s election campaign alliance with the leftist Democratic Revolution Party. The coalition was engineered by former PAN president Ricardo Anaya, who went on to become its presidential candidate, placing a distant second behind López Obrador.

Calderón said the PAN has been “completely destroyed” and incapable of confronting the new government.

“There are citizens asking the question, ‘What are we going to do now?’ and they have no place to go.” A new political party with a commitment to ethical standards and not just politics is required, he said.

However, he said the party could remedy the situation by choosing veteran politician Manuel Gómez Morín as its new president because it is currently controlled “by the group that destroyed it.” Whether he goes ahead with the launch of a new party will be decided in large measure by the choice the PAN makes, Calderón said.

Calderón also brought up the highly-criticized invitation to Venezuelan President Nicolás Maduro to attend López Obrador’s inauguration on December 1. Calderón observed that Maduro’s predecessor, Hugo Chávez, was a guest at his own swearing-in ceremony but pointed out that “the current human rights crisis did not exist” in that country at the time.

“At present Maduro is a symbol for authoritarianism. For the sake of democratic consistency he should not be at the inauguration.”

Source: El Financiero (sp)