MEXICO CITY (AP) — It’s been a long and strange journey for Mexico’s Green Ecologist Party, which has leveraged its alliance with the ruling Morena party to become the second-largest voting bloc in Congress.
This Green Party is best known for picking presidential winners, as it did this time with the new president Claudia Sheinbaum and make strategic alliances regardless of political ideology than to take on environmental causes.
But it has always been a strange political group in Mexico. Founded by the millionaire owner of a chain of discount pharmacies, the Green Party has repeatedly called for the reinstatement of the death penalty, mandatory English classes for school-aged children and a life sentence for kidnappers.
He’s good at handing out free campaign swag — backpacks, T-shirts and water bottles with the “PVEM” logo, for Mexico’s Ecological Green Party — and getting influencers and celebrities to post videos of support, supposedly in exchange for payments. .
The party has allied itself with those who think it will win. He was an ally of the former Institutional Revolutionary Party, the conservative National Action Party, and now clings to the ruling Morena party of President Andrés Manuel López Obrador.
This worked for them, because Mexico’s arcane electoral laws allow coalition parties to distribute votes, congressional seats, and state governments among themselves.
This means that the Greens, who have almost never functioned as a true opposition, will likely replace the National Action party as the main opposition party in Congress in September. Although the Green Party won far fewer actual votes in the June 2 elections than National Action, it will have more seats in Congress due to “proportional representation” rules designed to favor smaller parties.
But these alliances mean that the Greens supported López Obrador’s policies to revitalize Mexico’s state-owned oil industry and its production of heavy crude oil and highly polluting, poorly refined fuel oil. The government subsidized airports, highways, and gasoline prices while building the Maya Train tourist line through jungles and fragile caves on the Yucatan Peninsula.
“The Green Party is anything but green,” said Adrián Fernández Bremauntz, director of the activist group Climate Initiative. “They voted against the environment, against public health and against the fight against climate change.”
The party promotes its efforts that increased penalties for polluters, banned animal acts in circuses and added the right to a healthy environment to the Constitution.
But in 2009, the Green Party also proposed the return of the death penalty for kidnappers who kill their victims. The proposal was not adopted. Mexico formally abolished the death penalty in 2005, but has not carried out an execution since 1961.
This led the European Greens coalition to say publicly in 2009 that it did not consider the Mexican party a member of the Green political family.
“It is not consistent with (environmental) causes,” but it wins votes from young people or those who are well-intentioned but poorly informed, said Fernández Bramauntz.
In the late 1980s, the party’s founders, members of the González Torres family, saw the “green” label as an attractive marketing strategy that could likely sell politically.
“The environmentalist label has been hijacked here in Mexico,” said Paula Sofía Vásquez, co-author of the book “The Green Mafia,” who called it “a business model based on politics,” because, according to Mexican electoral law, the government finances most electoral campaigns.
And from their business experience, they also realized the importance of marketing. The party relied primarily on younger, physically attractive candidates, social media influencers and celebrities, and catchy one-line slogans based on whatever issue was on voters’ minds.
Green Party leader Karen Castrejón said the group supported some controversial proposals because they were “fundamental to our country.” Castrejón attributed the party’s success to “political engineering” and “solid proposals”.
“Unfortunately, we have always been stigmatized as a party,” said Castrejón. “They say we always go with whoever is in power.”
Things got so bad that, in 2015, around 150,000 people signed petitions asking electoral authorities to deregister the party. The effort failed.
María Marván, a legal expert at the National Autonomous University of Mexico, was part of the country’s electoral council at the time.
“It was a very lively discussion,” said Marván. “They were involved in a lot of underhanded dealings.”
