Green Is Good as Mexican PRI Ruling Party Seeks Allies to Keep Power Adam Williams and Patricia Laya - Bloomberg
go to original March 31, 2015

A large billboard advertisement for the Partido Verde, Mexico's Green Party, stands over a parking lot in Mexico City, Mexico, on Feb. 24, 2015. (Susana Gonzalez/Bloomberg)

Rosario Saito, a nursing student, plans to vote for Mexico’s Green Party in June’s congressional elections because she has no faith in the ruling Institutional Revolutionary Party, or PRI. It’s an attitude that should ensure the PRI holds on to power.

Support for the Green Party, which despite its name has few links with the international green movement, rose to 11 percent in a poll by Parametria-El Financiero last month, compared with 6.5 percent during the last mid-term elections in 2009. Backing for the PRI fell to 32 percent from 37 percent over the same period, the survey showed.

While the Green Party portrays itself as an alternative to the government of President Enrique Pena Nieto, the party almost always votes with it in congress, said Alberto Serdan, a political analyst at the Center for Economic Research & Teaching in Mexico City. The relationship should enable the PRI to hold onto a majority in congress in June’s vote and maintain fiscal austerity, even as anger mounts over drug-related violence and sluggish economic growth, he said.

“The two parties have a relationship of coexistence and function as a complement to one another, like a business,” said Serdan. “The Green Party acts as an alternative, but at the end of the day, the PRI and the Green Party join their votes to move their legislative efforts forward.”

The Partido Verde, as it is known in Spanish, blurs its ties to the PRI with promotional slogans such as “you must be the change you want to see in the country” and “a government that achieves is what we need.” Its website cites the PRI’s 71 years in charge of Mexico until 2000 as one of the reasons for forming the party in 1986.

While the party vaunts its support for issues such as prohibiting the use of animals in circuses, its advertising campaign doesn’t mention it voted in favor of the PRI’s policy to allow fracking in Mexico.

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