Many saw Sunday’s summit of the National Political Council of the Institutional Revolutionary Party (PRI) as a kind of re-launching aiming at the 2017 and 2018 elections. Skeptics are laughing not just because of the deplorable performance PRI had in last June’s elections, where it lost several long held governorships but also because of the long, long list of corrupt politicians it has produced in its 86 year-old-history.
President Enrique Peña Nieto, PRI’s top leader, was keynote speaker and as usual, even in disarray as the PRI seems to be in nowadays, he asked society to vote again for the party and not to judge millions of PRI members for a few rotten apples who don’t “even deserve to be militants.”
“At PRI,” he added to approximately 8,500 members gathered at the Mexico City headquarters, “there is no room for corruption or impunity.”
These are exactly the two political crimes the rest of the competing political parties accuse them off, and the ones scorning “the return of the PRI” during the next two years.
During the gathering, PRI members closed down the works of the Sixth National Political Council meeting in which 737 nationwide delegates were elected (selected, critics claim) to run the PRI from 2016 to 2019.
Peña Nieto called upon the militants to “join in the agenda Project to give continuity to the transformation of the nation,” to win the presidency during the 2018 coming election and “sanction those who broke the law as they are cases that make society angry and sanctioning them can’t be an omission.”
He crowned his speech repeating a phrase often said before by prior leaders, claiming that “PRI is the only (party) that has shown competence in governance and that has made and written history for our nation.”
The pep talk by Peña Nieto was really expected, as were the proceedings of the hundreds of members who got front row seats and whose only difference from the old ones is that they are millennials and President Peña Nieto posed with hundreds of them for a selfie.
In short, regardless of the passing of time and new faces ornamenting it, the cardboard façade the PRI had 50 years ago remains as stiff an ever. There’s no spontaneity or freshness in the same old stale promises of yesteryear.
Accompanying President Peña Nieto was the majority of his cabinet, many of who will definitely be candidates for governor in the three state elections in 2017, and the 12 in the 2018 election when a new president will also be chosen by the people.
And all governor-hopefuls — if nothing changes between now and when the time comes for selection of candidates — will be hand-picked by the President himself. Within the PRI perennial system, the President picks the candidates for governor, and those candidates get to pick the candidates for senators, deputies and municipal mayors of their state. This formula worked well within the PRI’s vertical power exercise.
However, nobody believes in the stern unity the PRI leader says there is in the party ranks. On the contrary, angry rifts are happening all over the nation within party ranks and these have been doubled now that there is democracy in Mexico unlike in the old days, when the PRI was “the perfect dictatorship” and all those who ran for it had electoral victory assured.
Last June elections ousted the PRI from the states of Veracruz, Chihuahua and Quintana Roo, but not only that, the PRI former governors of those three states (although they are not the only ones, by the way) are being hunted down for thievery and corruption.
But when all PRI members show allegiance to the maximum chief and the party as well in a party structure, says an observer, that functions from top to bottom in vertical decision making and where disagreement and debate are substituted by patched up agreements.
Of course within party discipline in his speech President Peña Nieto addressed those from other parties who have jumped the electoral gun and have taken a leap into the electoral fray as of now. At PRI, he warned all followers, there is a rhythm to appointments and when then are necessary, they will be there.
Carefully listening to the behavioral set of rules that has made the PRI what it traditionally has been, were “los tapados”, the hoodies, who aspire at becoming the presidential candidate when Peña Nieto says so, probably in the last quarter of 2017. So until then, knowing they are in the running, they will have to keep a hood over their heads till the President unveils “el tapado.”
That time will come, but it only comes to prove that very little in the electoral system of the PRI has changed since it was founded in 1929.
Their problem is times have changed and the PRI hasn’t: competing parties are thoroughly aware of this which they consider an advantage to oust Peña Nieto’s party out of power.
