In the elections on June 5, when the governorships of Aguascalientes, Durango, Hidalgo, Oaxaca, Tamaulipas and Quintana Roo will be contested, the opposition political parties (PAN-PRI-PRD) and Morena, with their allies PT-PVEM, the place to occupy heading to the 2024 presidential elections is at stake, electoral specialists Héctor Díaz Santana and Víctor Alarcón agreed.
And it is that of the six governorships at stake the PRI, PAN and PRD go together in Aguascalientes; Durango; Hidalgo and Tamaulipas.
In Oaxaca PRI and PRD go together, PAN on their side; while in Quintana Roo PRD and PAN are in alliance and the PRI alone.
For Díaz Santana, a scholar of electoral law and former head of the Specialized Prosecutor for Attention to Electoral Crimes (Fepade), today the Specialized Prosecutor for Electoral Crimes (FEDE), in the electoral processes of governor in six states of the Republic what the The opposition is playing is “to maintain an effective, functional coalition that exists”, and serves its “project of presenting a common candidate in the year 2024.
“That is to say, what is at stake is knowing if (the opposition political parties) can walk together and if the differences can be settled or elucidated through dialogue and negotiation.
“The opposition has worked on coalition processes with the idea of being able to balance the political competition of a party that has really proven that, from 2018 to date, it is a dent machine. The opposition, if it is not united, can hardly win. There are places where the electoral process would be with a very wide margin for the Morena party.”
Regarding Morena, the party in power, he explained that what is at stake is to be able to continue “the effective mobilization processes to win the elections” because “it is a political party that has presented problems of internal fractionalization.
“They have to show that they know how to play together (the morenistas). It is already necessary that they begin to modify the political discourse. In a democracy we live in institutions and the discourse of openness, plurality, freedom, is a constitutional guarantee and it is necessary, for the good of the country, to avoid this radical discourse and begin to establish new parameters in which it is shown that they can govern for all.
Díaz Santana warned that in electoral processes in Mexico “one of the most worrying issues is violence.”
“One of the characteristics of the elections in recent years is the violence that has manifested itself in different forms. We have seen a lot of violence, from political gender violence to extreme violence where there have been homicides and also that multiple candidates have had to resign because they were threatened. This is a very worrying issue and there must be a public policy to eradicate it.”
Electoral machinery fine-tuned
A researcher specializing in political processes, Alarcón explained that the opposition and Morena will try to form “a more or less consolidated structure” in the current gubernatorial elections, which would provide “a scenario of how the electoral machinery would be in perspective in relation to the election ( presidential) of 2024”.
Except for the cases of Coahuila and Edomex, the two governorships that will be contested in 2023, he affirmed, after this year’s gubernatorial elections, the political map will practically have to be realigned.
Under current conditions, he said, “the government party already has majority control of the governorships and that, in terms of availability of resources, capacity for mobilization and structure, already gives it a very important advantage.”
From his perspective, much of what Morena has achieved in four years in the gubernatorial structure has been a very favorable balance for the government.
The chances of defeating Morena depend, he added, “on her mistakes, more than on the virtues of the opposition.”
Unless the opposition parties get “a sufficiently powerful (presidential) candidacy,” he concluded, they could “overshadow Morena’s electoral machinery, or there were a series of elements, here unfortunate circumstantial ones such as a growing economic crisis or that there would be ungovernability for other reasons, where finally the electorate could assess another option.