Claudia Sheinbaum had kept her distance from her party’s leadership. Until yesterday.
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Yesterday, the president took the reins. At the head of Morena, all indications are that she will impose a woman she fully trusts, Ariadna Montiel, whom she has described as “the best organizer in Mexico.” In the negotiation of candidacies, Citlalli Hernández will remain, a woman with extensive left-wing pedigree and principles akin to those of the president.
The control of the party is complemented by a series of actions that, little by little, have been weakening the cadres less loyal to the president. Figures such as Adán Augusto López, Andrés Manuel López Beltrán, Alejandro Gertz Manero, and Marcelo Ebrard himself have been forced to step back.
The president is on a roll, and the signs indicate that she now seeks to put her stamp on the party: Morena ‘in Excel’.
I allow myself to use the phrase ‘in Excel’, with which my colleague, Jorge Zepeda Patterson, once described Sheinbaum, because it seems to me a term that excellently summarizes the direction in which the party is now headed.
In Sheinbaum’s eyes, the party’s leadership needed greater systematization, order, and efficiency. And there is no one better to impose it than Ariadna Montiel, who has already done so before as leader of the Servidores de la Nación, Sheinbaum’s parallel bureaucracy.
The president likes to surround herself with focused, orderly, and consistent people. She values structure, productivity, and has little tolerance for errors. In fact, if anything unites the cadres Sheinbaum has promoted, it is precisely their discipline and method.
By Sheinbaum’s standards, Luisa María Alcalde had not delivered good results. The elections in Durango and Veracruz were a disaster for the party. Her disagreements with allies led to the de facto loss of the qualified majority. And worse still, if the polls are not wrong, the next local election in Coahuila will be a debacle.
Now, the challenge for Sheinbaum and her pawns will be to ensure that structure and method do not end up extirpating the party’s heart.
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When metrics of affiliation, militancy, or number of committees become the primary method for measuring a party’s success, incentives change. Parties cease to be living organisms that attract genuine organizers and begin to gravitate towards corporatism and professional organization. This, in turn, attracts a different type of politician: the cacique, the person who seeks a position of popular representation as a way of life, not as a vocation.
Unlike a public institution, a party is not a homogeneous corporation that can be given fixed orders. It is a group of people motivated by inspiring leadership or a desire to change the country.
The dilemma is that administrative tools can purge or demotivate precisely the most valuable mobilizers. Those who are authentically allied with the party and who rarely have the capacity to compete with professional politicians in achieving goals.
An efficient party that loses its ability to inspire increasingly depends on the state apparatus and less and less on its grassroots.
That is why, behind the most successful parties, more than spreadsheets, there are shared ideals, desires, and enthusiasm. The risk Morena runs is that it becomes a party very good at winning elections, but very uninspiring for its bases.
Thus, Sheinbaum’s true challenge as the party’s new indirect leader will not be technical, but political. It will be to keep alive the energy that brought Morena to power while instilling the order she deems necessary.
If the president achieves that balance, she will consolidate her leadership over Morena in a lasting way. If not, she will have gained control of the party just as it begins to empty from within.
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