LatAm in Focus: Ten Years in, What's the Future of Mexico's Morena Party?
LatAm in Focus: Ten Years in, What's the Future of Mexico's Morena Party?
Pollster Lorena Becerra and political scientist Javier Aparicio explain the meteoric rise—and the 2024 electoral test—for President AMLO’s political party.
In 2024, Mexico marks not just the biggest elections in its history, but a milestone for the leftist force now in power. It will be 10 years since the National Regeneration Movement—better known as Morena—officially became political party. And its rise has been nothing short of meteoric. In a single decade, it has come to control two-thirds of the country’s 32 governorships, most of the state legislatures, and the largest number of seats in both houses of Congress.
Much of that power expansion comes down to one man, President Andrés Manuel López Obrador, who helped sweep the party into power when he won the 2018 election. But on October 1, 2024, his single, six-year term will come to an end. “He has always been quite a phenomenon. So generally, when he goes to the polls, he usually exceeds his party’s vote by at least 10 percentage points," explains Lorena Becerra, the founder of Becerra Mizuno y Asociados and former head of public opinion at Mexican daily Reforma. The political analyst told AS/COA Online’s Carin Zissis that the big question is what will happen as Mexicans prepare to vote for more than 20,000 officials—from the president down to municipal roles—on June 2, 2024. “Now we have to see how Morena is going to survive for many years to come without him, because he built this party.”
Get updates on Mexico's giant elections, right up through the outcome of the June 2 vote.
Javier Aparicio, a political scientist at Mexico City-based Centro de Investigación y Docencia Económicas, agrees. “Being in government usually is politically costly. It's easier to promise than to deliver,” he says, noting that Morena itself appears to be aware of the issue, which explains why it has taken steps such as weakening the electoral agency to strengthen its own hand. But that doesn’t mean Mexico is ready to join an anti-incumbent wave witnessed across Latin America, says Aparicio. “In many regions of the country, Morena is still seen as the new way or with new hopes. Part of the story is the opposition parties haven't been able to reinvent themselves and time is running out for them."
But Becerra says it is too early to call the election, explaining that, despite AMLO’s popularity, Mexicans give his government poor marks for its handling of issues, such as healthcare, violence, and organized crime. It could leave voters divided on the country’s correct path forward. Becerra adds that, even though Morena’s candidate, Claudia Sheinbaum, holds a double-digit lead over opposition alliance candidate Xóchitl Gálvez, results in presidential votes over the past quarter century defied early polling. “Six months is a really long way to go,” says Becerra. “A greater part of the electorate—the ones who are not so politicized as we are—they start paying attention closer to the election.”
Looking to the future, Aparicio says the twenty-first century shift away from giving any political party hegemonic control in Mexico is a reason for hope about the country’s politics. “I have a long run of optimism about the Mexican voter,” he says, “They should be able to punish a bad government, because they have done it in the past.”
Claudia Sheinbaum, Xóchitl Gálvez, and Jorge Álvarez Máynez are competing for the presidency. See polls ahead of the June 2, 2024 election.
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