Déjà Vu or Something New? Mexican Politics in the 2024 Elections
What does Cuauhtémoc Cárdenas' support of Claudia Sheinbaum and the 4T portend for the 2024 presidential election?
Promises of democracy, increased electoral participation, and clean elections have been a constant since Mexico’s first elections following the Revolution. While there has been significant change since the end of the hegemonic rule of the Partido Revolucionario Institucional (PRI), experts argue that the very nature of Mexico’s electoral system facilitates electoral fraud primarily because the ruling party exerts control over the country’s electoral authorities, and as such, has outsized control over electoral processes. Cuauhtémoc Cárdenas, the founder of the Partido de la Revolución Democrática (PRD) and three-time presidential candidate is perhaps Mexico’s most iconic opponent of electoral fraud – having been a victim himself in the 1988 presidential election.
Earlier this week, he joined Claudia Sheinbaum at an event to commemorate the 86th anniversary of the expropriation of Petróleos Mexicanos (Pemex), Mexico’s state-owned petroleum company which occurred during his father, Lázaro Cárdenas’, presidency. Not only was Cuauhtémoc Cárdenas present at the event, but he verbally expressed support for Sheinbaum and the Sigamos Haciendo Historia coalition.
The topic of energy is synonymous with sovereignty in Mexico and Cardenas’ presence at Sheinbaum’s event, plus his announcement of his support for her candidacy may foreshadow bigger things to come. Cárdenas is perhaps one of the most well-known figures in Mexican politics, especially in the context of electoral legitimacy and his loss in the 1988 presidential campaign. AMLO took inspiration from Cárdenas following his own loss in the 2006 elections due to alleged electoral fraud. Like Cárdenas stepped away from the PRI and founded the PRD, AMLO stepped away from the PRD and founded Movimiento de Regeneración Nacional (Morena).
AMLO and Cuauhtémoc Cárdenas: A 30 year-long Saga
I would be remiss not to acknowledge the unsteady, ever-in-motion relationship between AMLO and Cárdenas. Their history traces back to the late 1980s with the founding of the PRD. AMLO supported Cárdenas as he fought for the presidency in the 1988 election, and Cárdenas supported AMLO during his term as the president of the PRD from 1996 until 1999.
In the 2000 elections, Cárdenas ran for president while AMLO ran for the Head of Government of Mexico City; AMLO won, Cárdenas lost. Some analysts argue that AMLO’s decision to exclude Cárdenas from his cabinet in favor of bringing in AMLO’s own close allies led to the demise of their relationship. In 2005, both Cárdenas and AMLO were nominated as the PRD’s presidential candidate. The party’s internal selection process culminated with the selection of AMLO as the party’s candidate - a decision that Cárdenas did not support. AMLO ran for the presidency in the following election cycle (2012), but this time with the public support of Cárdenas, going so far as to promise that Cárdenas would be named the director of Pemex if AMLO won the election. AMLO did not win the election and shortly thereafter left the PRD to form his own party, Morena.
Cárdenas did not explicitly support AMLO in his 2018 bid for the presidency, but the two reunited after the election and publicly affirmed their mutual support. In the years since, however, Cárdenas has publicly criticized and questioned some of AMLO’s decisions during his term as president. In February 2023, AMLO responded to a question during his daily mañanera that Cárdenas is a political adversary in the wake of Cárdenas supporting the proposals put forth by “Colectivo por México.”
Cuauhtémoc Cárdenas and PRI Politics (pre-2000s)
In his younger days, Cárdenas was closely affiliated with the PRI, working alongside his father to shift the party further to the left. He served as governor of the state of Michoacán from 1974 until 1980 and was later re-elected, both terms representing the PRI.
In 1987, internal politics within the PRI led the then-president, Miguel de la Madrid, to hand-pick Carlos Salinas de Gortari as his successor in an informal, but well-documented move termed “el dedazo.” PRI insiders (including Cárdenas and Porfirio Muñoz Ledo) had previously tried to democratize the candidate selection process but proved unsuccessful. As such, Cárdenas and allies left the PRI to establish their own party, Frente Democrático Nacional (FDN) which consisted of the dissenting members of the PRI and various members of left/center-left in Mexican politics. This party served as the forerunner to the PRD and Cárdenas was the FDN candidate in the 1988 election.
At this point in history, the PRI was hegemonic and had never been substantially threatened by a competitor party. While the de la Madrid government and PRI elite knew that the FDN would take votes away from the PRI, the party never perceived a real threat from other political parties in the country because the party had such a substantial grip on power in Mexico. When initial election results indicated Cárdenas’ lead, the de la Madrid administration and PRI machine panicked and decided to lie – saying “se cayó el sistema” – meaning that the computer system tabulating votes had crashed. The phrase quickly became a euphemism for electoral fraud in Mexico. Three days after the election, with no official results released yet, Cuauhtémoc Cárdenas announced his own victory. This announcement was based on preliminary data from official tally sheets which indicated that Cárdenas held a lead of 6% over Salinas (38.8% to 32.7%) with one-third of the total votes counted. The government continued to resist the release of the official voting data, but according to historian, Andrew Reding, a source within the government leaked that Cárdenas did indeed win the election, but the government was stalling to manipulate the vote count.
A week after election day, Mexico’s Federal Electoral Commission (CFE) released the “official” election results. Salinas won the election with 50.36% of the vote, Cárdenas came in second with 31.12%, and Manuel Clothier (the Partido Acción Nacional (PAN) candidate) with 17.07% of the vote. The PRI also retained control over both chambers of Congress. Six of the seven opposition parties decried fraud and ten days after the election, Mexico City’s Zócalo was filled with people protesting the election results.
As Reding put it, “Mexico now ha[d] two claimants to the presidency: one with the weight officialdom, the other backed by the largest civic mobilization in Mexican history.”
Public Response to the 2006 Presidential Election
Does this sound familiar?
In 2006, AMLO, the then PRD candidate for the presidency, lost the election to the PAN’s Felipe Calderón by less than .60% (or less than 300,000 votes). AMLO and his allies appealed the election results and when that proved unsuccessful, they took to the streets to protest the election results in one of Mexico’s biggest civilian mobilizations, with AMLO supporters camping out in the Zócalo and taking over the Paseo de la Reforma – a major thoroughfare in Mexico City – for 47 days. The movement reached its apex on November 20th when AMLO hosted his own ceremony to take office as the “Legitimate President of Mexico.” AMLO unsuccessfully ran for the presidency for a second time in 2012 and left the PRD to found Morena in 2014, eventually winning the presidency in 2018.
Looking ahead in 2024…
Though the 2024 election results are far from clear at this point, allegations of electoral fraud are already underway – and led by Mexico’s chief executive, the president himself. Sheinbaum and other political leaders in Morena have corroborated these claims, though how electoral fraud can be preemptively declared, I’m not sure. Polling data shows the incumbent party candidate with a significant lead, but that’s not enough.
What will come next in the months leading up to the election and then after the fact is unclear, but the president and his allies have a significant strategy playbook at their fingertips. While there is increased independence between the executive branch and the country’s electoral authorities, AMLO’s attempts to influence the electoral process are abundantly clear and best exemplified by his attempts at electoral reform. Only time will tell whether or not they’ll use the other tactics, ones they once so strongly condemned, to sway the results of the election