( Spanish) – Morena, the ruling party in Mexico, elected Luisa María Alcalde, Secretary of the Interior, as its new national president on Sunday. Andrés Manuel López Beltrán, son of outgoing President López Obrador, will be the new Secretary of Organization.
The mayor, also a former Secretary of Labor, thus takes the reins of Morena with the slogan of building “the second floor of transformation,” which in the words of President-elect Claudia Sheinbaum “is a call to defend the causes of the political movement” initiated by López Obrador, and to give continuity to his national project.
In her new role, which will begin on October 1, Alcalde will be accompanied by López Beltrán, who will be responsible for coordinating the party structures.
The 37-year-old mayor took over as Morena’s leader after the party’s unquestionable victory at the polls on June 2, which gave it the country’s presidency and a qualified majority in the Chamber of Deputies, allowing the ruling bloc — made up of its allied Green, Ecologist and Labor parties — to approve the controversial reform of the judiciary. It also won 24 governorships and 27 of the 32 local congresses.
For lawyer and political analyst Vanessa Romero, the first challenge facing Alcalde at the head of Morena will be to “maintain the unity of the movement” in the face of the danger that could be represented by the presence of different groups and political currents that dominate it.
“She (the Mayor) already mentioned the importance of continuing with political training. Yesterday (Sunday) she spoke about promoting the National Institute of Political Training led by Rafael Barajas ‘El Fisgón’, the credentialing of militants who registered in 2022, it is time to regularize all those people,” Romero told .
The analyst points out that the Secretary of Labor and former federal deputy also faces another great challenge: achieving sufficiently good results.
“In the midterm elections in 2027, it will not seem like Morena is backtracking. Let us remember that in 2027 two things will happen: they will compete for Congress, for 15 governorships and for the recall of Claudia Sheinbaum’s mandate,” Romero added.
Experts consulted highlight, in addition to the presence of the Mayor, who is very close to the president, the intervention of a son of López Obrador in the new structure of Morena as well as the presence of two important forces within it.
“This implies that great political talent would be needed, both on the part of the new president and the son of the president, to avoid confrontations, but instead to make it a task of collaboration,” says former electoral advisor Eduardo R. Huchim.
President López Obrador revealed on September 9 that the second of his three sons would participate in the ruling Morena party, an announcement that received criticism from the opposition and some analysts who considered that such a position implies “prolonging” in some way the power of the outgoing president.
“We are seeing the consolidation of a transgenerational political group, but united as a family to maintain power, to continue this transformation, so to speak, of Mexican politics and therefore the consolidation of a policy of hegemony,” Eduardo Higuera, a political analyst and academic at Anáhuac University, told .
Romero, for her part, disagrees that López Beltrán’s presence is a symbol of nepotism, as the opposition and some critics of the president have accused him of. Something that López Obrador and the Morena party have denied. The Mayor herself spoke out against nepotism in the same meeting in which she and López Obrador’s son assumed their positions in Morena.
“This would not be the first time that we see the children of important politicians joining the national public life. An example of this is Cuauhtémoc Cárdenas himself, or his son, Lázaro Cárdenas Batel. And it should also be noted that López Beltrán’s arrival did not happen yesterday; he has accompanied his father since 2006, in important tasks of mobilization and territorial organization, especially in the State of Mexico and Mexico City, two of the bastions of López Obrador’s political movement,” says Romero.
Now that its founding leader is retiring from public life, many doubts surround Alcalde’s leadership at the head of Morena, but also the arrival of Claudia Sheinbaum to power. In her speech on Sunday at the World Trade Center in the capital, where the National Congress of Morena was held, and after requesting leave from the party’s membership, the president-elect called on supporters not to make it “a state party.”
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