Teaching Comparative Government and Politics

Monday, April 09, 2012

Reinventing the PRD

According to Mark Stevenson's reporting in the San Diego Union Tribune, Obrador and the PRD are having difficulties redefining the party and its policy positions.

Mexico's left in disarray ahead of election

Andres Manuel Lopez Obrador has left behind his image as an angry leftist for what he's calling his "Republic of Love" campaign in a second try for the Mexican presidency…

But while Mexicans appear ready to boot out the ruling center-right National Action Party, or PAN, it's not Lopez Obrador's Democratic Revolution Party they are turning to for change. Instead, the Institutional Revolutionary Party, which governed Mexico for 71 uninterrupted years…

But Lopez Obrador's move to a gentler center this time around may not have been enough..

Lopez Obrador now courts the middle class and independent businessmen who say Mexico needs a break from the big monopolistic corporations that came to dominate the country under the PRI and the PAN…

It's the kind of strategy that could have put Lopez Obrador over the top in 2006, but now seems tardy.

"It may be late, because if he had done it six years ago, without doubt he would have won," said Manuel Camacho Solis, a former Mexico City mayor who was among Lopez Obrador's campaign coordinators in 2006 and now leads an informal coalition of leftist parties…

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