And… they’re off!

Franc Contresas, as usual, does a much better job at CGTN (China Global Television Network) than the US media when it comes to English language TV reports from Mexico.

The electoral season is starting much earlier than usual… and a few “explanations” might be useful:

• Morena is a relatively new party, only formed (and sometimes carved out) of a few older minor parties. It’s much easier in Mexico to form a new party than in the United States. That it has become the majority party in just a few years, forcing the “traditional” parties to form an “all oppositin coalition” is itself remarkable.
• While it is a constitutional requirement that a president not have held elected public office for (I think it’s six months) before their election, Morena’s party rule is that a candidate for the “primary” (more on that in a second) not hold a public office (or a presidential appointment) during this time. Recently resigned Foreign Minister Ebrard, and the unmentioned — though serious contender — Interior Minister Aden Adrian Lopez — as well as the other Morena candidate, Ricardo Monteal who was “majority leader” in the Chamber of Deputies have resigned their offices, as have the two “external candidates” from coalition party parties… the Green and the Workers’ Parties.
• The “primary” is something of an experiment, and looks like a promising way for parties to select a candidate more likely to present the voters with what they want than the US system with its messy state primaries, or countries where some party central committee choses the candidate (or, the old Mexican “dedazo” (roughly… “the finger”… as in one’s index finger, not the middle one) where the President just named his successor and the party central committee agreed.
  
  The four Morena, and two coalition partner candidates will make their pitches on the main issues, followed by polls conducted by outside firms of party memer’s preference among the candidates. Six polls will be taken over the next several moths, with the candidate chosen on the basis of the results (with some input by the central committee).
• At some point… the PRI, PAN, PRD… and possibly Citizen Movement (MC) will either pick their own candidate, work out a coalition candidate (among the 20 or so declared hopefuls) acceptable — if reluctantly — by most of them. Or, one or two parties will get in a snit and run their own person… hoping not so much to win the presidency, as to at least gain enough votes to keep their registration or to be eligible for a bigger share of proportional representation seats in the legislature.

In short… while anything can happen (and, as Porfirio Diaz supposedly said, “Nothing happens in Mexico… until it happens”)… it very much looks like Claudia Sheinbaum will be the next Mexican President, and maybe for a change, the US media will focus on something else… the “novelty” of a woman (and a scientist, and of Jewish extraction) as president of a country they generally only think of in terms of drugs, migrants, and cheap labor.