By Tim Pelzer
The Communist Party of Mexico (PCM) has launched a country wide campaign to meet official requirements to get on the ballot for the 2027 and 2030 elections.
Party leader Pavel Blanco told Peoples Voice in an interview that the PCM must gather 350,000 signatures as required by the National Electoral Institute (INE) to regain its electoral registration. The Party has set up committees in municipalities across Mexico, that are collecting signatures in the country of more than 131 million people. It is also using social media including its YouTube channel (El Machete TV), X and Instagram to gather signatures.
Mexicans who want to support the Party’s registration can sign the online Plataforma Comunista de Mexico. They will then be contacted by PCM committees in the area, who will gather their signatures.
According to Blanco, INE also requires the party to “hold assemblies in 200 electoral districts with 300 registered voters or 20 state assemblies with 3000 voters. Each meeting must then elect 3 delegates that must attend a national assembly.”
The PCM has until February 28, 2026 to meet the requirements demanded by INE, to get on the ballot.
The PCM leader said the Party wants to run candidates who will fight for the working class in the upcoming 2027 and 2030 elections. He said there is little difference between the governing social democratic National Regeneration Movement (MORENA) and right-wing opposition parties in the Chamber of Deputies and Senate which support the big corporate monopolies and the richest 1 percent of the population. “The existing parties differ little in their programs and end up bribing people to vote for them,” stated Blanco.
Since its refounding in 1994, the PCM has been unable to regain its former electoral registration that it achieved in 1978. 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. The Party ran candidates in 1979, winning 5.4 percent of the vote and electing nine deputies to the National Congress, to become 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. Then in 1987, the PSUM changed its name to the Mexican Socialist Party (PMS). In 1988, the PMS dissolved and formed the Democratic Revolution Party (PRD) with dissident members from the long governing Institutional Revolutionary Party (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 MORENA in 2011 – inherited the PCM’s electoral registration and property. The PRD went on to form an alliance with the 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 newspaper El Machete, PCM 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.”
Support working-class media!
If you found this article useful, please consider donating to People’s Voice or purchasing a subscription so that you get every issue of Canada’s leading socialist publication delivered to your door or inbox!
For over 100 years, we have been 100% reader-supported, with no corporate or government funding.
