Mexico may soon stand alone as America’s only left-wing power. Where’s the Mexican right?
Mexico’s right-wingers are stuck in a state of indefinition.
With the victory of a far-right candidate in Colombia and president Lula falling behind in Brazil’s presidential polls, it now seems increasingly likely that Mexico will be the only large country south of the US to have a left-wing government. The ruling Morena party, however, seems under no threat of losing its preeminence.
How the right became unviable in Mexico is a central theme of the recent book by The Mexico Political Economist’s director Alex González Ormerod—La derecha no existe (pero ahí está). Though the book is in Spanish, here is an excerpt of its introductory essay exploring the Mexican right’s past failures and how it got to its current prospects.
Right by elimination
This book is a bad idea. Several people, respected and admired in public discourse, confided this same opinion to me. One of them deigned to explain why: “What you need to understand is that there is no such thing as ‘the right.’ That’s something the left made up.”
Terrible news for an author trying to write about the nature, current activities, and future of the right in Mexico. However, the last part of that statement stuck with me: “The right is an invention of the left.” Many of those interviewed for this book repeated this phrase to me in one way or another. Perhaps you think so too.
Upon further inquiry, these interviewees insisted that the old ideological divisions are irrelevant in the 21st century and that the left-right divide is a fallacy. The world, they told me, is divided between good and bad government. At the same time, they were adamant in their belief that the forces of evil reside almost exclusively within the political sphere they call “the left.” Thus, not only was the current Mexican government categorically left-wing, but so too—when they acted poorly—were various elements of past PRI and PAN party administrations.
These critics are right in two respects: The political spectrum is insufficient to describe the complexity of politics, and in the case of Mexico, the right is nowhere to be found as an actual political alternative in Mexican electoral politics, at least not anymore.
