By Tim Pelzer
Despite electoral rules designed to keep opposition parties off the ballot, the Communist Party of Mexico (Partido Comunista de México, PCM) announced it will be pressing authorities to allow them to participate in the upcoming 2027 and 2030 elections.
At a recent Central Committee meeting, the Party leadership announced that it will be sending an application to the National Electoral Institute (INE) asking to be registered as a political party for the 2027 and 2030 elections, even though it cannot meet the current requirements to get on the ballot. The INE is currently registering political parties for the next round of elections.
Since its refounding in 1994, the PCM has been unable to regain its former electoral registration that it achieved in 1978 after many years of struggle. Mexico has the most restrictive electoral laws in the world, designed to maintain the political monopoly of the existing political parties and keep out rival competitors.
To register as a political party and run candidates in elections, INE demands a list of 3,000 members in each of the 300 electoral districts throughout the country, and the signatures of one percent of the voters list, impossible demands for small parties like the PCM to meet. The requirement to submit a membership list is an unacceptable one for the Mexican Communists – over the years, five Party leaders have been assassinated and one disappeared for their activism.
The electoral law also allows INE to intervene and remove elected leaders during internal disputes and impose new ones.
To achieve the PCM’s electoral registration in 1978, the ruling Institutional Revolutionary Party (PRI) government only asked that the Party submit its publications for the last five years and a Central Committee membership list, according to PCM leader Pavel Blanco Cabrera.
The Party ran candidates in 1979, winning 5.4 percent of the vote and electing nine deputies to the National Congress, becoming the third-largest party in the country.
In 1981, members voted to dissolve the PCM and form the United Socialist Party of Mexico (PSUM) with other left forces. In 1987, the PSUM changed its name to the Mexican Socialist Party (PMS), which dissolved in 1988 to form the Party of the Democratic Revolution (PRD) with dissident members from the PRI.
The PRD – to which former Mexican president Andres Manuel Lopez Obrador belonged during the first part of his political career, and which he abandoned to form the National Regeneration Movement (MORENA) in 2011 – inherited the old PCM’s electoral registration and property. The PRD went on to form an alliance with the right wing National Action Party.
Denied ballot access for the 2024 elections, the PCM ran Marco Vinicio Davila for President as well as candidates for various states governors as write-in candidates. According to the Party publication El Machete, Communist Party candidates officially received at least 85,000 write-in votes and probably more since “we have evidence that many of the votes our candidates received were marked as null.”
The Party also announced that it will deliver its electoral reform proposals to newly elected Mexican President Claudia Sheinbuam who has promised electoral and political reform. The former MORENA government of Lopez Obrador made no effort democratize the country’s electoral system.
The PCM believes that the social democratic government of MORENA is not interested in implementing real change in Mexico. “The first months of Claudia Sheinbaum’s mandate confirms her continuity with Andres Manuel Lopez Obrador, with clear anti-worker and anti-people content based on militarization, state corporatism, the utilization of [state] assistance as a mechanism of social control” according to a Party statement. “Her priority is the maximization of monopoly profits based on NAFTA and nearshoring, and therefore the communists maintain a policy of opposition to the second stage of the fourth transformation, and we work for a popular anti-capitalist and anti-monopolist working-class regroupment.”
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