“Colectivo por México”: will the new opposition alternative work, or is it destined to fail?

“Imagining a different and inclusive Mexico” is one of the purposes of a new political group that has emerged in the Latin American country, Colectivo por México (Collective for Mexico), according to one of the speakers at its presentation, Fernanda Rocha, who defines herself as a scholar of the future.

Among the participants in the presentation of the group, which claims to seek “a new vision of the country from the citizenry”, are some well-known politicians from the last decades of Mexican public life, such as the former governor of Sinaloa Francisco Labastida and the former rector of the National Autonomous University of Mexico José Narro.

Building a more just, prosperous, inclusive, and peaceful society is the organization’s purpose, the members stated in a presentation communiqué published on January 30, 2023.

However, the appearance of this platform was received with some distance and skepticism by different voices on social networks, including memes and jokes.

Mexican President Andrés Manuel López Obrador himself described the initiative as a moderate wing of traditional conservatism that opposes his political project.

Sputnik spoke with National Regeneration Movement (Morena) militant Antonio Attolini; Querétaro Congressman Paul Ospital, the Institutional Revolutionary Party (PRI) standard bearer, and UNAM academic Hugo Garciamarín to try to get a glimpse of the scope and possibilities of this new political force, which claims to be non-partisan and non-profit.

A NEW LOGO FOR THE SAME PRIVILEGES

The Mexican political opposition is organizing itself under new names and logos.

Still, its interest is not to generate new leadership but to defend the same privileges it is accustomed to, says Attolini.

“The simulation of electoral competition that differentiated the PRI (Institutional Revolutionary Party) and the PAN (National Action Party) is now useless in terms of public discussion, but now they resort to the protective mantle of this concept of civil society, which they have worn out so much,” he says.

“The opposition does not seek to have new faces but to actively defend this preserve of privileges taken away from them through the partisan way, through the electoral way, and that today, under the mantle of civil society, they are seeking to defend the Morenaist values.”

Attolini expresses no doubts that Colectivo por México seeks to oppose López Obrador’s political project, considering that society can be divided between politicians and non-politicians, partisans and non-partisans, is a legacy of neoliberalism.

On the other hand, the president calls them adversaries “because in effect they are an opposition force to his project, they are so in a complete way even without being in a political party and even without asking for the vote”, says the graduate of the Instituto Tecnológico Autónomo de México (ITAM).

The Morena militant adds that it is normal to distrust the Colectivo por México because they are already known political actors “with the same discourse, confronting the people of Mexico who sent them to the dustbin of history”.

These opposition politicians appeal to categorize the 2018 democratic decision that brought López Obrador to the presidency as a mistake, an exceptional circumstance, assesses Attolini.

“By confronting the president, they who think they are so sophisticated, so intelligent, so superior, are then going to be able to convince people to realize that mistake they made, that’s why they continue in that logic, confronting the president, trying to make that we were fools who voted at the time, that we are going to be able to recognize it, accept it, and then return to the comfortable and warm lap of the PAN, PRI, and PRD parties,” he criticizes.

“They lack a project because they assume that theirs, as it is and without any comma to be modified, is the right one, is essentially the best, and that people would only have to realize it”, he adds.

MEXICAN OPPOSITIONS “HAVE NO IMAGINATION”

Political scientist Hugo Garciamarín, professor and doctoral candidate at UNAM, considers that the Mexican political crisis is not limited to the characters of Colectivo por México but encompasses the entire traditional political class.

“The political class has been the same for 30 years, not only in the opposition but also in what we could call the ruling class, or if we want to call it ‘obradorism’, if we look at each of the faces, there are practically no young people”, he points out.

Although now distributed in two different camps, the university professor believes the Mexican political class is essentially the same as former presidential candidate Cuauhtémoc Cárdenas, who initially associated with this new group from which he later distanced himself.

The opposition forces in Mexico “do not have imagination; they are half identifying that, in effect, there is a middle class, lower middle-class weariness towards what obradorism represents, but as they do not have imagination, the only thing they find is to try to appeal to that discontent from their own cultural frameworks, which have already been completely surpassed”.

“They launch a completely contradictory discourse, this old political class that has been discussing citizenship for 30 years. They are trapped in their own cage of melancholy (they show) they don’t know how to appeal to that part that is not well (of the current government) from cultural frameworks different from their own, and then they keep returning and returning melancholically to that same place from which they can no longer get out,” he ironizes.

However, Garciamarín points out that not only López Obrador’s traditional opponents are trapped in a binarism between Obradorism and counter-Obradorism, but the Mexican political landscape in general.

“If those are the key points of dispute, we are without any real alternative; if they just have to be against ‘Lopez Obradorism’, then they don’t have to be forced to think of alternatives”, he qualifies.

The significant possibility for the future that the political scientist sees in Colectivo por México, to avoid remaining as a new opposition grouping to deflate with time, is that it formalizes the addition of the forces of the Movimiento Ciudadano party to a possible electoral alliance with the PRI, the PAN and the PRD to defeat Morena, a possibility that so far they have refused.

“I see not so much a social future but a partisan future. I believe that there they could advance a little more in these two poles of Mexican politics; if not, it will remain the same, and it is not worth changing names, ” he exposes.

“ONLY TYRANTS POSSESS THE ABSOLUTE TRUTH”

It is very important to listen to different voices of the Mexican social panorama because no one has the absolute truth, said during an interview, the PRI member Ospital, a local legislator in Querétaro, in support of the emergence of the Collective for Mexico.

“It is very important to listen to all the visions, the different approaches we have towards reality to create a better diagnosis and, consequently, a better proposal towards 2024 and 2030 and 2036 in our country”, values the parliamentarian.

However, he agrees that Labastida, Narro, and other members of the newborn collective are protagonists of the political life of the 20th century, so it will be necessary to listen to the leading voices of the politics of the 21st century.

“You face a megaphone that comes out every morning from the National Palace with the tools that the Government has, and then to make your proposals and counter-proposals heard is truly a titanic task”, said the PRI member.

About the possible addition of Movimiento Ciudadano to this possible general alliance against Morena, Ospital recognizes that the opposition to the ruling party is pulverized, and numerically, no party has a chance to win individually.

“The president managed to split this country into two great halves, electorally speaking”, he accuses.

With information from Sputnik