Stay Radical or Get Pragmatic? AMLO’s Party Has to Decide

For most of its five short years in existence, Mexico’s Morena party, short for the Movimiento Regeneración Nacional, has revolved around one politician: Andrés Manuel López Obrador. AMLO, as he’s known, treated the party as his personal platform, made most decisions unchallenged, and neglected to build any institutional framework to sustain it. In July of last year, he was elected president in a landslide, receiving 53% of the popular vote, more than double his nearest rival and the most since an opposition candidate first won Mexico’s presidency in 2000. Even more remarkable, Morena and its allies won majorities in both houses of Congress, which surprised even some of the party’s own leaders.

Now almost a year into its dominance of Mexico’s government, Morena is suffering through a period of fierce infighting ahead of its first scheduled leadership contest in late November. At stake is the future direction of the party, whether it should double down on the anti-establishment agitation that helped it ascend to power or become more like a traditional political group: formal, organized, hierarchical. The contest has become so contentious that AMLO threatened to quit Morena.