The debacle suffered by the opposition in the Mexican elections of June 2 has left the conservative National Action Party (PAN) in a state of shock from which it has not recovered and from which it urgently demands a leader and a political program that can unite the right-wing tendencies in the country. Otherwise, there is a risk that the ultra-ideology will escape from the pack on its own, as has happened in other countries. It will be complicated in Mexico, due to its historical characteristics and the bureaucratic difficulties in setting up a party, but there is no shortage of candidates who in recent times wield the well-known slogans for family, security, life and Christian values. The path is paved.
As unique as Javier Milei or strange as Donald Trump, the former mayor of the main district of the Mexican capital, Sandra Cuevas, has recently visited Spain, where she has met with the former PAN president Felipe Calderón and his wife, Margarita Zavala. She has announced her interest in founding a new party to compete for the presidency in 2030, with a slogan with far-right overtones: For the Family and Security of Mexico. Cuevas has been one of the most bizarre figures in Mexican politics in recent years. She was photographed with a chainsaw in the streets, cutting down the pergolas of the terraces that the bars set up during the pandemic, and dressed like a policeman guaranteeing law and order in the streets with his four-wheeler, as if straight out of an American action movie. Milei? Trump? Bukele? She is a hybrid who has no shortage of admirers. Brash, shameless and fed up with traditional politics, she has tried all the parties and abandoned them or been abandoned by all of them.
Acclaimed by the global far right, who encouraged him to run for president – Trump has been one of them – at the meetings of the Conservative Political Action Conference (CPAC), Eduardo Verástegui tried it on this occasion, but the legal tangle to form a party in Mexico and the number of signatures that must be collected left him by the wayside.
The ultra-Catholicism of Verástegui, a former singer, chorus girl and soap opera actor, permeates all his political values. He also likes to be photographed with rifles threatening to put his opponents in their place. The editor of openDemocracy for Latin America, Diana Cariboni, who has been pursuing data on the financing of the far right in this region, knows the transfer of money that comes down from powerful American Catholic organizations to finance these movements. “It is known that some organizations in North America have also received it, but it is not easy to determine how much it is for Mexico or Canada, those breakdowns are not given,” she says. “It is not always money that links them, we do know that they act in a very coordinated manner and that there are Mexicans in several of these organizations,” he says.
Those who trust that the PAN will raise its head to reorganize the Mexican conservative forces around it are looking at the clock, worried. “The PAN, without being a radical party in origin, has known how to channel the far-right groups that have always existed in Mexico, such as Yunque and others,” explains Juan Ignacio Zavala, a former PAN militant who calls for his party to recover without complexes the values that are its own and define an agenda as soon as possible. “The PAN is ashamed to say that it is right-wing, it was difficult for it to declare itself a Christian Democrat. Today we can say that Claudia Sheinbaum [the president-elect who will take office on October 1] is the first one who will be left-wing, who does not come from the PRI, but where is the right?” asks Zavala, a great analyst of Mexican politics. “The right has its causes, you just have to grasp them,” he says.
Risk is a word that many accept as valid when asked about the possibility of the far right gaining a foothold in Mexico. Zavala himself does so. “Of course there is a risk, as has happened in other countries. Trump took over the Republican Party and destroyed it. [Marine] Le Pen [in France] has taken up causes and motives and has grown. Either they look for causes to take up again or other leaders outside the PAN will grow, be it Sandra Cuevas or others. Family and freedom are clear and relevant concepts for society, as is security, understood as order and respect for the law. They seem like fascist words, but we must lose our fear of them,” he suggests. And in Mexico they could be well received, given the violence, corruption and the shamelessness with which laws are violated.
Academics such as Mario Santiago and Rodrigo Castro Cornejo, specialists in these political movements, also see a “risk” of the far right gaining ground due to the PAN’s inaction after its electoral debacle. “Given the PAN’s lack of clear discourse, more radical options are gaining ground. It is dangerous, we have already seen it in Europe, for example. The electorate changes at a tremendous speed,” says Santiago, a researcher at the Mora Institute in Mexico. Castro Cornejo, however, believes that the risk could occur in the future, if Claudia Sheinbaum exercises a truly left-wing government “and there is a reaction at the other extreme, as happened in Brazil after Lula da Silva and Dilma Rousseff, with the arrival of Jair Bolsonaro, or in Chile. In that case [the radicals] could see their opportunity,” explains the professor at the University of Massachusetts Lowell.
Source: elpais
