Lack of Strategy

Ezra Shabot decries the poor strategy from the parties in this year's campaign:

In this mid-term election, lifeless and boring, the party that commits the fewest errors will take the victory. The winners will triumph more because of the negligence of their adversaries than because of their proactive capacity and political ability demonstrated in the contest.

This is an astute observation, but the brush with which Shabot is painting is too big. Two parties have built something resembling a coherent strategy--the PAN and the Green Party. The PAN's is built on two ideas: no other party can be trusted to fight the drug traffickers, and the PRI remains a cesspool of corruption not fundamentally different from its incarnation a generation ago. While it is unlikely to vault them into the winner's circle, the strategy has cut into the PRI's lead a great deal. And although I think the Green Party is an ideologically bankrupt, opportunistic party with little to add to the national conversation, it's hard to deny the fact that it's made quite a splash with its simple electoral platform: the death penalty, medical vouchers, and education, with famous faces acting as spokesmen.

At the same time, the PRI and the PRD have really missed an opportunity to offer some defining characteristic of themselves. With the PRD, the dispute between Ortega et al and AMLO is a big part of that; the lack of an expressed identity is a reflection of a very real confusion over the party's identity, which will have to be resolved before the party takes to the task of laying out what it offers Mexico. But for the PRI, it seems more a case of, as Shabot says, negligence. PRI leaders were so far up in February that they thought simply rebutting PAN charges was tantamount to a broad electoral strategy, or so it appears. In 2012, what are going to be the baseline characteristics of the PRI campaign? Truly, anything is conceivable.