The head of government of the CDMX and 22 governors of the 4T published a statement to reject the draft sentence of the magistrate Jeanine Otálora that proposes to invalidate the extension of 14 additional months to the mandate of Mario Delgado and Citlali Hernández as president and general secretary of the National Executive Committee (CEN) of Morena. They argued that, if approved, “it would represent a clear illegal interference in the internal life of a political party.”
The paper, whose discussion and vote is scheduled for April 19, has been revealed to the media for a week. Its approval would force the political party in government to organize the renewal of its national leadership before August 31 of this year.
The problem is not time – four months would be enough to carry out an internal process – but the lack of institutions within Morena to process the change in its governing bodies.
According to the party’s statutes, the presidency and the general secretariat of the CEN must be renewed every three years. Last time it took five. They only did it because the Electoral Tribunal forced them based on sentences and incidents of non-compliance with sentences. In the end, he had to order the INE to take charge of organizing a survey to select the national leadership.
The other problem, of course, is that Mario Delgado and Citlali Hernández want to keep their positions and power, despite what the statutes say. They aspire to be the ones who cast the candidacies for the 2024 elections and to ensure a good position in the next political cycle, which begins after the presidential election.
It is striking that the head of government and the 22 governors, some of whom are not even members of Morena, condemn Judge Otálora’s project as an interference in the internal life of the political party. What happens within political parties cannot stay within political parties.
The principle of self-organization does not grant the Morena leadership a license to fail to comply with its constitutional obligations or to set aside the political rights of the militancy. Nor does it give you carte blanche to violate its own statutory provisions. Otherwise the internal life would lead to tyranny.
To avoid the renewal of the national leadership after three years in office, Mario Moreno and Citlali Hernández promoted a statutory reform. To this end, they convened the III Ordinary National Congress of Morena that was held on September 17-18, 2022. However, they cheated.
At the time of publishing the statutory reform project, on July 16, 2022, they did not mention anything regarding the extension of the mandate of the CEN presidency and general secretary. One day before the Congress, on September 16, they announced the proposal for a transitory article that extended the commission of Mario Moreno and Citlali Hernández until October 31, 2024.
When asked about the justification for the extension, Morena argued that it would allow him to face the 2023-2024 electoral process with a stable national leadership. But this cannot be considered as an extraordinary or exceptional situation. As Judge Otálora’s project says, every year there are electoral processes.
The figure of the extension is not even provided for in the body of the statutes, which clearly establish that the members of the CEN will last three years and that re-election in the same position is prohibited. In other words, the transitory goes against the entire statutory order in order to privilege two specific people. Instead of protecting internal life, he simply serves the interests of the current leadership.
*CIDE professor.
Twitter: @BenitoNacif
