In referendums to be held Sunday, August 27, Movimiento Ciudadano (MC) mayors in 25 Jalisco municipalities will put their jobs on the line, allowing their constituents to decide whether their mandates up until now have been a success or failure.
A fledgling party that made substantial gains in the 2015 state elections, the MC has made “citizen participation” a focal point of its strategy.
All 25 presidentes municipales have signed agreements pledging to step down from their posts – along with their entire cabinets – should the public give them a thumbs down in Sunday’s midterm vote of confidence.
Balloting takes place in public spaces between 8 a.m. and 4 p.m. All Mexican residents aged 18-and-over, residing in the municipality are entitled to vote (voter IDs must be shown). Officials serving as scrutinizers have been chosen through an independent process and are not members of any political party.
The MC first held a ratification referendum in the metro-area municipality of Tlajomulco in 2009 and repeated the exercise in 2011, when Enrique Alfaro, the current mayor of Guadalajara, was “approved” with a staggering 97 percent of the vote.
Alfaro has vigorously defended the process and has called on mayors of other parties to subject themselves to the same scrutiny.
Opposition parties say Sunday’s “ratificacion” vote is nothing more than an electoral machination, constitutionally illegal and a waste of money. The federal National Electoral Institute (INE) has no role in the poll, which is being funded exclusively from municipal coffers. (The Guadalajara election is costing 2.5 million pesos; Tlaquepaque’s 1.5 million pesos and Zapopan’s more than a million pesos.)
The poll is a “political trampoline” to maneuver “egotistical” Alfaro into prime position for the 2018 elections, when he is expected to run for the Jalisco governorship, said Salvador de la Cruz Rodríguez, councilor of the opposition Institutional Revolutionary Party (PRI) in Guadalajara. “If he is successful, he will take a leave of absence, telling everyone, ‘The people have given me their approval. I can leave with a clear conscience.’”
In previous years, mayors have faced criticism for abandoning their posts after a couple of years to run for more prestigious offices.
Opposition councilors in Guadalajara have also called into question the impartiality of the municipal Citizens’ Participation Committee, which is overseeing the poll. (These consejos ciudadanos have been set up in each MC-run municipality. Their representatives are split between sitting city councilors from various parties, and members of the public.)
The Guadalajara committee’s president, Margarita Sierra, a supposedly independent citizen participant who is also the director of the University of Guadalajara’s Audiovisual Faculty, has been criticized for ignoring a call from National Action Party (PAN) councilor Alfonso Petersen – himself a former mayor – to cancel the vote because Alfaro has repeatedly violated municipal laws in trying to curry public favor by inaugurating a slew of public works in the weeks leading up to an election.
Jalisco’s PRI governor, Aristoteles Sandoval, joined in the chorus of critics, calling the polls a sneaky political maneuver that will only measure the popularity of the mayors rather than the quality of their performance.
Independent state lawmaker Pedro Kumamoto, who has also made citizen participation a core principle of his labor, says the MC’s ratification process has both positive and negative aspects.
“On the one hand you have non-paid citizens on the committees who are doing a commendable job, but on the other there are political operators who see this as a pre-electoral exercise – and that is not right.”
Alfaro claims the ratification poll demonstrates his party’s commitment to democracy.
But with only 600 voting slips distributed to each booth in Guadalajara, the total number of potential votes is 165,000. In the 2015 election for Guadalajara mayor, 663,607 votes were cast – 50.3 percent in favor of Alfaro, the eventual winner.