By MARK LORENZANA
The Citizens’ Movement Party (MC) announced on Tuesday, March 7, that it will not field candidates for the 2023 gubernatorial elections in the State of Mexico (EdoMéx) and Coahuila, which will be held on June 4.
Dante Delgado, national leader of the MC, said that the centralist Institutional Revolutionary Party (PRI) and the ruling leftist National Regeneration Movement (Morena) of Mexican President Andrés Manuel López Obrador (AMLO) have, allegedly, “already agreed among themselves that the PRI would hand over the State of Mexico to Morena in exchange for Coahuila.”
“It is no secret. The parties in power agreed among themselves, so that everything remains the same. During the campaigns, we are going to see political operators who have been in the PRI all their lives, working for Morena, moving resources, structures, everything,” said Delgado. “We are going to see PRIMor operating as they have already done in Campeche, Hidalgo, Oaxaca, Sonora and Sinaloa. They agreed in exchange for impunity and to continue living in power.”
The PRIMor alliance that Delgado was referring to reared its ugly head late last year when both PRI and Morena deputies approved the contentious reform to extend the Mexican Armed Forces on the streets until 2028 for public-security tasks.
Juan Zepeda, an MC senator who was a potential gubernatorial candidate for EdoMéx — although he was trailing in an unofficial poll conducted in February, coming in at a distant third with 4 percent behind Morena’s Delfina Gómez and the PRI’s Alejandra del Moral, who got 55 percent and 41 percent, respectively — said he supported the decision of his party and its leadership, and added that “the MC will now prioritize the 2024 presidential elections.”
“We are not going to be complicit or part of a farce. This lateral step is going to define us as a totally different party,” Zepeda said.
Delgado’s counterpart in the PRI, Alejandro “Alito” Moreno, accused the MC and its leadership of being cowards.
“Once again, the MC shows that it is not up to the task, especially in the crisis that the country is experiencing,” Moreno wrote on his official Twitter account. “This is cowardly. They say they need to step aside, but what they are really doing is just repeating the speech that Morena dictated to them.”
MC Deputy Jorge Álvarez Máynez immediately responded to Moreno’s accusations.
“The big problem of the alliance is you,” said Máynez, addressing Moreno. “That’s why not even your party’s candidates want you in their campaigns.”
In June of last year, current and former leaders of the PRI called for the resignation of Moreno. Among Moreno’s detractors in the PRI leadership included Miguel Ángel Osorio Chong, former secretary of the interior, and former PRI President Claudia Ruiz Massieu, who said in August that her party must undergo an internal evaluation on how to organize, “to present ourselves to the citizens and to develop a relationship with the Mexican people.”