AMLO’s Morena Wins the Mexican Midterms
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Journalist Kurt Hackbarth, founder of the independent media project “MexElects,” is currently coauthoring a book on the 2018 Mexican election. We’ve excerpted this passage from his Jacobin analysis on the June 6 midterms.
In the end, none of it was enough. A pile-on alliance of right-wing parties, the vociferous backing of business associations, the overt partiality of the National Electoral Institute, the NGO-funneled financing of USAID and the National Endowment for Democracy, desperate scenes of vote buying and disruption of precincts, and a near-uniform wall of major media, including last-minute anti-AMLO screeds in every outlet from the Economist to the Nation: none of it was able to prevent the Morena coalition from romping to victory in the Mexican midterm elections of June 6, retaining its majority in Congress and seizing two-thirds of the governor races in dispute.
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The overall results give Morena and its supporters a lot to celebrate. It showed resilience in its first outing as a party of government, demonstrating that it could win nationally without AMLO at the top of the ticket, in an off-season election that typically punishes the party in power, in the face of a united opposition, and in the context, moreover, of a pandemic whose repercussions have toppled presidents and prime ministers elsewhere in the world. Citizens on the streets also played a direct role, stepping in to foil repeated attempts at electoral crimes, with the backing of the National Guard, which made arrests in situations that have historically gone unpunished.
Armed with this endorsement from the Mexican public, the challenge for Morena in the coming session will be to maintain its momentum, to resist the temptation to coast, and to avoid, above all, getting prematurely entangled in the politics of the presidential race to come. It has been returned to Congress to deliver and — as the shot across in the bow in Mexico City has shown — what has been given can just as quickly be taken away. Manos a la obra.
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