Mexico interior secretary leaves ruling party after criticizing alliance with leftists

Mexican interior secretary quits ruling party

MEXICO CITY — Mexico’s interior secretary made a sudden split from President Felipe Calderon’s ruling conservative party, dealing it a new political blow on top of flagging support due to drug gang violence and an economic downturn.

Fernando Gomez Mont did not explain why he dropped out of the National Action Party, or PAN, but he recently clashed publicly with its leaders over their decision to form an alliance with Mexico’s main leftist party to win local elections.

The decision is sure to raise tensions between Calderon and his point man in the government’s bloody battle to crush brutal drug cartels, and it prompted speculation that Gomez Mont may step down from his Cabinet post.

“The relationship between Calderon and Gomez Mont probably won’t be the same,” said Jose Antonio Crespo, a political analyst with Mexico’s Center of Investigation and Economic Studies.

There was no reaction Thursday from Calderon, who was in Ciudad Juarez to address security in the northern border city where vicious turf battles between drug gangs have made it one of the world’s deadliest places.

Gomez Mont announced his decision in a letter Wednesday evening to the PAN, rocking the country’s political circles.

The PAN and the leftist Democratic Revolution Party, or PRD, clashed bitterly over the disputed 2006 elections that Calderon narrowly won against Andres Manuel Lopez Obrador.

But the parties have decided to field the same candidates in two gubernatorial races to unseat the Institutional Revolutionary Party, or PRI, which ruled Mexico for 71 years under a system of coercion and corruption that critics deemed a quasi-dictatorship. It still controls many state governments.

Gomez Mont has called the alliance an antidemocratic maneuver that sacrifices ideological conviction for bald political interests. In one speech, he said the pact amounts to “a sort of electoral fraud.”

The PRI lost the presidency for the first time in 2000 to Vicente Fox of the PAN, a stunning defeat that many Mexicans considered the birth of true democracy in their country.

But the PRI has undergone a resurgence in recent years, gaining seats in the 2009 legislative elections amid widespread discontent over recession and the drug war.

The PRI has also benefited from turmoil within the PRD. Although PRD leaders have decided to recognize the Calderon government, Lopez Obrador still calls himself the legitimate president and has created his own political faction. He has ordered his followers not to form alliances with the PAN.

Still, it’s not the first time the PAN has banded with its leftist rivals. In 1988, the PAN backed a leftist alliance, which later evolved into the PRD, in its fight to overturn presidential elections many Mexicans believe were rigged by the PRI.

After doubling its seats in Congress last year, the PRI pledged it had changed its ways and learned from its mistakes. It hopes to regain the presidency in 2012.