The Pedro Kumamoto bandwagon marches on relentlessly.
That’s the message gushing from the campaign of the 27-year-old state legislator seeking to become Jalisco’s first independent senator.
To register as an independent candidate, Kumamoto needed to obtain the signatures of 115,443 Jalisco residents willing to put pen to paper and give him their backing – one percent of the electoral roll.
He achieved this goal in the first week of January, well ahead of the deadline later this month. And he has vowed to carry on collecting more signatures up until the last minute.
Over the past 90 days, hundreds of affiliates of Kumamoto’s activist alliance, Wikipolítica, have fanned out to more than 45 municipalities in Jalisco, visiting 13 of the 20 electoral districts in search of support.
In total, 50 people are seeking to run as independent candidates for the Senate in various states of Mexico. Around half have failed to collect more than 1,000 signatures. Only Kumamoto, and another aspirant in Nuevo Leon, have gathered more than 100,000.
Up against the candidates chosen by the major political parties in Jalisco, Kumamoto will be at a financial disadvantage. However, he intends to replicate his frugal campaign of three years ago that was financed by small, private donations. Spending a fraction of his rivals, he caused a major upset, becoming the first independent state legislator at the age of 25 by winning a middle-class district in Zapopan that on paper looked a safe bet for the conservative National Action Party (PAN).
Buoyed by his tireless core of young supporters and a savvy social media presence, Kumamoto again hopes to cause a surprise. The task will be much harder this time, however. Not only will he need to win votes in Guadalajara – where his face is now well known – but in outlying municipalities where the governing Institutional Revolutionary Party (PRI) is well organized and usually able to get out the vote in its favor.
Kumamoto’s two years in Congress have been characterized by an effort to bring citizens into the process of government. It’s a philosophy that resonates well in the corridors of universities and in middle-class shopping malls, but may be less well understood in rural towns and communities where party politics predominate.
Although Kumamoto has been the subject of some criticism for not finishing his term of office in the state legislature, he reasons that the current crop of politicians are unable to offer new solutions to Jalisco’s deep-rooted problems – poverty, corruption, lawlessness – so he and his supporters need to be active at the federal level to make a lasting impression.
A large part of Kumamoto’s popularity comes from his strategy to keep one foot outside the “system” and one foot inside. He nonetheless remains respectful of Mexico’s institutions, and although some of his policies may appear to the left of center, he rarely gives any hint of having an ideological bias.
His agenda originates from the consensus of civil society – the voice of the people, a voice that he says is routinely ignored by Mexico’s political elite.