Still Sailing Smoothly

Carlos Marín notes that despite the PRI being the clear favorite in 2012 and dominating the agenda, the PAN and the PRD haven't been able to overcome their own internal problems enough to mount a coherent counter-attack. Hence perredistas slamming a budget bill that received the support of their chief in the Chamber of Deputies, and the PAN calling for Calderón to veto the spending bill passed earlier this week, despite the catastrophic impact such a move could have. With the help of a brilliant combination of mixed metaphors and offensive truisms, Marín hammers his point home:

In the midst of a raging river, the priístas gallop toward 2012 applying the maxim that "when your enemy is fucking up, don't distract him..."

I guess you can get away with more of that when you're running the place, as Marín is at Milenio.

I've always kind of assumed that the PRI's rise to political preeminence would be temporary, because a) the various factions of the PRI wouldn't be able to maintain unity for long with a presidential election coming up, and b) once the PRD and the PAN awakened to the real possibility of the PRI becoming a majority party in Mexico, they would find common cause in opposing the PRI at every turn, as they did at various points in the 1980s and 1990s. The first remains very likely, but I think I overestimated the second factor. PRD-PAN alliances in the 1990s were borne of the necessity of confronting an authoritarian party that had been governing for six decades. There was no other way to rip political power from the PRI. Today, with the PRI just another party in what is basically a level democratic playing field, a sufficiently strong imperative to overcome ideological differences is absent. In other words, even with the PRI looking great for 2012, what divides the PAN and the PRD remains a lot stronger than what unites them.