The Democratic Revolution Party (PRD) — which Andrés Manuel López Obrador represented in the 2006 and 2012 presidential elections — will lose its registration as a national-level political party because it failed to get 3% of the vote in all three federal elections held on June 2.
PRD national president Jesús Zambrano effectively acknowledged the demise of the leftist party at an event in Mexico City on Saturday.
“It hurts, but it’s up to me to say it. … The PRD we built 35 years ago no longer exists as such,” said Zambrano, who represented the party in the Chamber of Deputies during three separate three-year terms.
However, the “enthusiasm” to “continue fighting for a democracy that today is under threat” is still “alive,” he said.
“I can’t hide my sadness, … but I hope that with all this political capital we accumulated … we have something to start a new cycle with,” Zambrano said.
The National Electoral Institute (INE) announced last week that it had advised the PRD that it had entered a “period of precaution” because it didn’t reach “3% of the valid vote” in any of the three federal elections held earlier this month.
The PRD contested the elections as part of a three-party opposition bloc that also included the National Action Party (PAN) and the Institutional Revolutionary Party (PRI).
The INE said in a statement last Monday that, “in accordance with article 94 of the General Law on Political Parties,” a party “enters a period of precaution” when it faces “any” situation that would cause it to lose its registration as a “national political party.”
The PRD is set to be deregistered at the national level because it obtained just 1.86% of the vote in the presidential election, in which it supported Xóchitl Gálvez; only 2.43% of the vote in the Chamber of Deputies election; and just 2.27% of the vote in the Senate election.
The INE will appoint a person this Wednesday to carry out the process to liquidate the PRD.
Founded in 1989 by a group of people that included López Obrador and well-known leftist political figure Cuauhtémoc Cárdenas, the PRD quickly became Mexico’s third political force, after the PRI and the PAN.
Cárdenas represented the party at the 1994 and 2000 presidential elections, after he finished second to the PRI’s Carlos Salinas in the 1988 contest, which was widely considered to have been fraudulent. The National Democratic Front he represented in 1988 is considered the immediate predecessor to the PRD.
López Obrador won the 2000 mayoral election in Mexico City on a PRD ticket, and subsequently represented the party at the 2006 and 2012 presidential elections, which he lost to the PAN’s Felipe Calderón and the PRI’s Enrique Peña Nieto, respectively.
He won the 2018 election as the candidate for the Morena party he founded just a few years earlier, while the PRD joined the PAN in a right-left alliance that backed Ricardo Anaya.
On Saturday, Zambrano acknowledged that the “majority” of Mexican voters “rejected Xóchitl and the PRI-PAN-PRD coalition” on June 2.
“They didn’t trust us. We didn’t win them over. … There was never a campaign strategy that was discussed and agreed to by everybody. … The war room operated without coordination with the leadership of the parties,” he said.
On social media after the party event, Zambrano said that if the PRD loses its national registration “we must work for the legal registration of a new party, with a new name, leaving behind the practices and bad habits that caused the current results.”
On Monday, López Obrador acknowledged the PRD leader’s remarks, and said that party he helped found “played an important role in its time because … [it] avoided that bipartisan attempt [to control politics by the PRI and the PAN].”
“And it was a party that arose from the people, from an electoral fraud. … It fought for just causes,” he added.
With reports from El Financiero, El Economista and Latinus
