By Chris Covert
Rantburg.com
As Jose de Jesus Grijalva of Partido de Revolucion Democratica (PRD) pressed his case to overturn the 2012 presidential election, and Partido Revolucionario Institucional (PRI) president elect Enrique Pena Nieto selects his transition team, Partido Accion Nacional (PAN) leaders began the slow transition to their new status as an opposition party after 12 years of rule.
President elect Pena Nieto's announcement of his transition team came midweek and included a central figure in his government while he was governor of Mexico state.
The team members are: Louis Videgaray Caso, Jesus Murillo Karam and Miguel Angel Osorio Chong.
Murillo Karam served as PRI general secretary under PRI president Beatriz Parades Rangel, 2007 to 2011. During that time PRI made tremendous gains in statehouses in the 2010 election, securing 11 of 14 that year.
Osorio Chong served as governor of Hidalgo state 2005 to 2011.
But Videgaray Caso is the most significant appointment of Pena Nieto, having served as his finance minister the first four years of Pena Nieto's term as governor of Mexico state. He left government to become PRI's Mexico state general secretary, and was out of government by 2009. The most significant iissue is that if Pena Nieto moved public funds for political use, Videgaray Caso probably knew about it.
Meanwhile Zambrano Grijalva went on the electronic interview circuits to press his case for a trial in front of the Tribunal Electoral del Poder Judicial de la Federacion (TEPJF), and juridicial arm of the Institutio Federal Electoral (IFE), the independent government body that manages national elections in Mexico.
The PRD is an aggrieved party in the matter, and according to several Mexican news articles, PAN is not, having coming in third place in both the presidential and Chamber of Deputies and Senate races.
In an interview with Mexican CNN Mexico journalist Carmen Aristagui, Zambrano Grijalva said that a PRD complaint filed in late April had put PRI campaign spending at almost three times the campaign limits. Putting the total at MX $1.8 billion (USD $135,402,480.00), he said the spending does not include the Soriana gift card scandal, which emerged just after the polls closed in Mexico July 1st. That scandal is said to involve amounts totalling at least MX $100 million (USD $7,522,360.00).
Zambrano Grijalva also said that PRD's case was submitted to the TEPJF last Thursday. According to other Mexican news accounts, the case won't be decided until September.
For his part, PAN president Gustavo Madero Munoz told Mexican press last week that PAN would not be involved in pressing to have the election results thrown out since PAN polled so poorly nationwide. PAN has other matters on its plate.
Last Monday, former presidential candidate Santiago Creel told El Universal's redpolitica.mx, that PAN had suffered internal divisions for years before the 2012 election, and that those divisions will need to be sorted out before PAN moves into its new role as the loyal opposition.
Having entered writing about Mexican politics this writer can only guess what the issues were, except amongst them were probably moving PAN further to the right in basic issues such as national security and in federalism.
One very good example of those problem politics was a tweet Madero made early in the presidential campaign talking about PAN's Josefina Vazquez Mota, when he quoted California US Senator Diane Feinstein about women working twice as hard to be considered half as good, adding "fortunately, that isn't very hard."
That tweet probably made for great guffaws but in a nation with a culture such as Mexico's, divided amongst conservative Catholics, radical statists and native mystics, the sentiment could not have resulted in very many votes for PAN.
Creel in his interview also said another of the problems for PAN is structural: There are simply not enough PAN politicians to help in a presidential campaign and to have enough personnel for government. Many PAN politicians, such as Madero, are independently wealthy. Left unsaid in the interview was PAN now owning only four statehouses, and faring as badly everywhere else in the critical municipal governments, where PRI is the strongest.
Still, having top PAN campaign advisors leave the campaign for personal reasons looked bad.
But nothing highlighted PAN's problems in the election more than the betrayal of former Mexico president Vicente Fox, when he endorsed Pena Nieto three weeks before the election.
What made this betrayal so egregious for PAN was that Fox had told Mexican press early in the campaign season that he considered Vazquez Mota a weak candidate. A week later Fox came to Nuevo Leon state and posed for a photo of him kissing Vazquez Mota in a presumed sign of endorsement, cordiality and redemption.
At about the same time Fox finally endorsed Pena Nieto, a press account came out about a poll that placed PRD only four points behind Pena Nieto. It is unclear if that report prompted Fox to make his endorsement. Fox since 2010 had made a number of outrageous comments to the press, one of them endorsing the leglization of marijuana in Mexico. It is unclear if his endorsement of Pena Nieto was out of fear of a PRD win or if he really felt Pena Nieto was a better candidate or president.
In his remarks, Fox said that a return of the PRI would not be such a bad thing, since reforms passed during 12 years of PAN rule severely restricted what PRI could legally do.
Nevertheless, Vazquez Mota campaign coordinator Roberto Gil Zuarth demanded Fox be expelled from the party, which is a process that Madero announced last Monday he would begin.
PAN has a long road ahead to rebuild its political fortunes, As editor of El Diario de Coahuila news daily, Javier Garza put it last week, PAN could emerge as a power broker in the Chamber of Deputies in moving forward reforms that PRI had sought to stop in the last three years.
But PAN's structural problems remain. PAN is weak at the municipal level, and little hope exists that that problem will be resolved anytime soon.
Chris Covert writes Mexican Drug War and national political news for Rantburg.com