What is happening politically in Mexico today is difficult to believe even for the Mexicans themselves. The PAN (National Action Party) rules and uses priist politics, the PRI (Institutional Revolutionary Party), in the opposition is panist and the PRD (Democratic Revolution Party) is lost, outside of reality.

(From Mexico City) THE CURRENT POLITICAL SCENARIO IN MEXICO is unrecognizable to anyone who has stopped following it no more than two years ago. What is happening in the country today is difficult to believe even for the Mexicans themselves.

The leftist Democratic Revolution Party, in its desperation to win the Mexican presidency at all costs, sacrificed (unscrupulously) its intellectual capital, its moral leadership, its political consolidation and the respect that it went about earning little by little, in search for a mirage in the form of a messianic candidate (Andrés Manuel López Obrador) who in the end did not lead the party to the promised land but instead to political isolation and a situation in which support for the party has been drying up until becoming the desert that it is today.

OUTSIDE OF REALITY

“Mexican politics are experiencing unknown scenes”After the great care with which the perredists (militant members of the PRD) carved out the defeat, which was slim and thus caused lots of frustration, they ended up squandering their capital with the burial of reason and the institutional route, which they had been taking up until a few years ago.

The Mexican left, far away from reality, is not even capable of being a fictionalized story; today it is, at best, a caricature of its dreams. The PRD and its allies, known as the Ample Progressive Front (FAP), are not fulfilling their ideological and (of course) social task, with their metaphysical presence in the Legislative Power of the Republic. The FAP makes a fool of itself through ambiguity, recognizing the current government in practice but not recognizing it in discourse and rhetoric.

Meanwhile, Mexican politics are experiencing unknown and surrealist scenes. The rightist and ruling National Action Party (PAN) puts forward legislative initiatives taken from the hands of its enemy from another time, the Institutional Revolutionary Party, which (as if it weren’t much) capitalizes on the permanent deep-rooted hostility between the PAN and the FAP.

DIRTY HANDS

But the fantasy does not end there. In order to not lose the support of the PRI in the House, the panist government, which as a candidate said that it had clean hands, is dirtying them through political maneuvering, and managed to achieve that all legal action in the Supreme Court be dropped against a governor who allied himself with a businessman to kidnap and torture a journalist, who did nothing more than denounce the sexual abuse of minors in which both were involved.

“What is necessary is a social, progressive and institutional party, with a European flavor, in which the social approach of a liberal economy open to the world is recognized” Likewise, the political rinses managed to make it so that another governor not be touched even with a ten foot pole. This governor, also from the PRI, brought his State to chaos a few months ago, and once in the midst of it, had to passively observe the army’s action in view of his manifested incapacity to govern and control the social violence.

In the middle of the current back-and-forth swinging, instead of setting the example and earning popular sympathy with insistence, responsibility and work, (even if it were for its legitimate electoral aspirations for 2009 and 2012), the left, the FAP, still has its sights set on its next internal electoral process, to see who will be the owner of the party (in both senses of the word), and if he who only a few of them recognize as a legitimate president either recasts himself as a presidential candidate or becomes openly indifferent.

TIME TO RENEW LEADERSHIPS

“In the surrealist Mexico of today, a “left” that does not have to be put in quotations is necessary” And to top off all of the stupidity, the most visible government official from the left, and the surefire presidential pre-candidate for 2012, the mayor of Mexico City, is building the biggest ice rink in the world in the center of the capital, with the ensuing cost of maintaining it frozen in a place where the temperature in winter does not fall below 15 degrees Centigrade; as if there weren’t misery or pressing social needs in the city or as if the Mexican capital were not part of a developing country with elevated rates of marginalization and poor distribution of wealth.

But if the ruling PAN is already known, and nothing that the PRI does surprises, a very distinct left is sorely missing. What is necessary is a social, progressive and institutional party, with a European flavor, in which the social approach of a liberal economy open to the world is recognized, which instead of filling the streets fills the ballot boxes, which protests less and proposes more, which recovers its prestige by appointing a renewed, respected, honest and intellectual leadership. A political association that for once buries all of the ancestry of the worst priism, that recognizes and accepts the democratic game, and that guarantees the rights of the laity and that can be seen in the mirror of reason and not in the mirror of populism.

In the surrealist Mexico of today, a left that does not have to be put in quotations is necessary.