“This June 2, citizens will have the enormous opportunity to put a stop to the authoritarianism that threatens our nation.” That is the call made by the political group I Trust in Mexico so that the voters of Jalisco bet on the continuity of the Citizen Movement (MC) in the State Government, but that they support the presidential candidacy of the opposition Xóchitl Gálvez. The campaign promotes “useful and intelligent voting” with billboards, stickers and brochures, in an attempt to stop the electoral advance of Andrés Manuel López Obrador and his party. “The objective is for Morena not to win,” says Salvador Cosío Gaona, the main promoter. The effort has not been without controversy, between crossed accusations of a “dirty war”, a sea of speculation about political motivations and the emergence of a direct response: the appearance of propaganda to support Lemus and Claudia Sheinbaum, the official candidate.
In the middle is the Citizen Movement. Jalisco is its main bastion and the party is not comfortable with these movements that rule out its presidential candidate, Jorge Álvarez Máynez, third and far away in the polls. The controversy comes on fertile ground. The still governor, Enrique Alfaro, has been very harsh with his candidacy and even floated the idea of joining the opposition front. As for Lemus, favorite for governor, he also distances himself from the “useful vote” and has announced legal actions against both campaigns.
The billboards with the faces of Gálvez and Lemus appeared since last March, at the official start of the presidential campaigns, although local media reported that they were placed since last year, in the pre-campaign. Calls for a “useful vote” are recurring in each election, but they are not usually promoted openly. Morena have been denouncing for months that this is an “illegal” strategy and have insisted that they intend to condition the citizen vote with “anonymous” advertisements. Cosío Gaona, former deputy and son of a PRI governor, defends that “there are no secrets” and maintains that the crossed vote is the best option for Jalisco. “We are not ashamed of it,” says the leader of Confio en México in an interview. “It is no crime to express ourselves and promote voting for two different parties,” he adds.
Cossío Gaona assures that Confio en México has a force of about 110,000 members in Jalisco and other States. Around half are active in opposition groups such as the National Action Party (PAN), the Institutional Revolutionary Party (PRI) and the Party of the Democratic Revolution (PRD). Last year they organized meetings with candidates such as the PAN member Santiago Creel, the PRI member Enrique de la Madrid and even Ricardo Monreal, from Morena. The rapprochements with Gálvez began in June and the support was formalized shortly after he won the candidacy of the opposition front, comments the leader of the organization. “From the beginning we told him that we would not have a commitment with a party bloc, but we declared ourselves anti-morena,” he explains. “Lemus also received our support in a very visible way, but we told him that it was only for him,” he adds.
The appearance of two different campaigns promoting voting for the Lemus-Gálvez and Lemus-Sheinbaum formula, promoted as “the true useful vote” and whose authorship remains a mystery, has caused discomfort on all political fronts. In terms of the public, Movimiento Ciudadano does not welcome the ruling out of its presidential candidate, Jorge Álvarez Máynez, third in the polls, in its main bastion. “We have already surpassed the PRIAN candidate in Jalisco for a while,” said Máynez on a visit to the entity and added that there is a good relationship with the party in his entity, despite the fact that Governor Enrique Alfaro has criticized his candidacy and had promoted the idea of joining the front.
The PRI, PAN and PRD front is also reluctant to recognize that Laura Haro, their candidate for governor of Jalisco, is not competitive. Some of its leaders, however, have flirted with the idea of dividing support. “If they talk about smart voting, that is voting for Xóchitl Gálvez, I invite my friends from the Citizen Movement to join,” said former PAN governor Emilio González Márquez, also a delegate of the Gálvez campaign in that entity. Morena does not want to face a
de facto
alliance between its main rivals in the national race and the ruling party in the State. “I would say it is a useless vote,” Sheinbaum ironically said at the beginning of the month.
Lemus himself distanced himself this week, saying that he was going to take legal action against both campaigns and asked that “little miracles not hang over him.” “I have absolutely nothing to do with either one or the other,” said the leader in the gubernatorial polls. The statements arise from another controversy: How are these resources going to be monitored and from which candidate are they going to be charged? “It's not going to be that they charge it to my campaign expenses,” Lemus reproached.
Cosío Gaona assures that the campaign has cost close to a million pesos and says that they will deliver the receipts to Gálvez's team as a donation from individuals. The Electoral Court ruled in favor of MC by recognizing that they have no relationship with the campaign and revoked a resolution of the National Electoral Institute due to omissions related to this case in its expense reports.
“The vote in Guadalajara is very volatile and changing, it is always a punitive vote and often differentiated, especially in the sectors that are more politicized,” comments David Gómez Álvarez, an academic at the University of Guadalajara. The researcher assures that behind the Lemus-Gálvez campaign are ex-PRI members who have felt displaced by the party, PAN members who have migrated to the ranks of MC and businessmen who see the growth of Morena in Jalisco as a threat. “I think that the fact that the Citizen Movement governs displaces the axes of analysis for someone who is not from here,” he adds. “Morena is hardly running a local campaign and is betting everything on the national side, while MC shows a certain orphanhood because it does not have a national campaign to support it and needs elements to separate itself or differentiate itself.”
The political scientist comments that some Morena supporters could be behind the Sheinbaum-Lemus campaign, as a way to make visible their discontent with the party's decisions at the state level. Gómez Álvarez sees a rearrangement based on the configuration of the political scenario in Jalisco: the PRI members went to Morena, the PAN members to the orange party. Factors in the new political game include the conservatism of various groups with a presence in the State, regionalist sentiments along the lines that “Jalisco is cooked apart” and Morena's problems in finding a local figure to capitalize on López Obrador's influence. comments.
It is not a new phenomenon in Jalisco. MC had already called for a “useful vote” in the 2021 elections, presenting itself as the only force that could compete with Morena at the legislative level and in local votes. There have also been previous attempts that have succeeded in the State, such as in the 2006 elections, in which the campaign that López Obrador was “a danger to Mexico” was launched. In other cases, Gómez Álvarez points out that there have been attempts in Jalisco to fragment the vote, especially in congressional races.
Adriana Báez, an academic at the National Autonomous University of Mexico, sees the election of Vicente Fox as the only precedent at the national level, where the idea spread that the “useful vote” was to remove the PRI. The researcher comments that the campaign that has appeared in Jalisco contributes to the pragmatism that has marked this election, with an opposition front that has insisted on the need to overthrow Morena, but that has had problems presenting a different offer of a political project and overcoming their ideological differences. “The idea is to overthrow López Obrador, but it is not clear what they are going to do if they come to power,” she says. The slogan may find an echo among certain sectors that experienced the hegemony of the PRI and fear that Morena will not have counterweights when promoting the so-called plan C. “There is a growing awareness of the importance of Congress in these elections,” she summarizes.
Cossío Gaona refuses to back down with the cross-vote campaign and anticipates that the next step will be to support MC's Senate candidacies, scheduled to be formalized next week. They will also hold meetings with orange candidates for federal deputies to analyze extending support. “I am not a traitor,” says the leader and insists that he has not been a member of the PRI since 2006. His brothers maintain his participation and they are the ones who must maintain party discipline, he comments. “I never committed to supporting the PRI,” he says.
Jalisco has more than 6.6 million voters on the nominal list and is the third State with the highest number of voters, after the State of Mexico and the capital. In 2018, the main beneficiary of the crossover vote was López Obrador, who obtained more than 53% of the votes, 11 points more than the Together We Will Make History coalition in the vote for deputies.
In Jalisco, the president obtained 1.4 million votes and Ricardo Anaya - then a candidate for the PAN, PRD and MC - almost 1.2 million six years ago. Alfaro, on the other hand, won as governor with 1.3 million, almost half a million more than the Morena candidate. Willibald Sonnleitner, a researcher at the College of Mexico, calculated that López Obrador won 55% of the preferences among MC voters nationwide. Confio en México hopes that the “useful vote” strategy will bring Gálvez closer to one and a half million votes or even two million. The last word will be the voters.