Peña Nieto plays down the PRD’s withdrawal from the Pact of Mexico

Mexican President Enrique Peña Nieto is trying to rush through his political and energy reforms while at the same time keep his leftist supporters from withdrawing from the Pact of Mexico multiparty alliance.

On Thursday, the president said that “it wasn’t necessary to always seek out unanimity” among the three parties that form the pact but instead drum up “sufficient consensus or seek majority backing on the things we want to change.”

Mexico’s leftist Democratic Revolutionary Party (PRD) said that its representatives walked out of talks held this week concerning changes to the electoral law and an overhaul of the energy industry.

Officials from the country’s three major parties – Institutional Revolutionary Party (PRI), National Action Party (PAN) and PRD – held an all-night meeting on Wednesday to finalize details of a political reform which, among other things, would allow the re-election of the president through a constitutional change and the creation of a national election council.

But at noon on Thursday, PRD leader Jesús Zambrano announced that his party was withdrawing from the alliance, which was formed last December.

“We are not going to permit these abuses to the legislative process,” he said, charging that the PRI government was trying to railroad through a packet of reforms that were never brought to the bargaining table for the three parties to discuss.

Peña Nieto would use the passage of the political reform to rush through an even broader energy proposal than the one he announced in August with new clauses that would open further Mexico’s state-run Petróleos Mexicanos (Pemex) to foreign investment, Zambrano said.

“We are not going to permit that discussions on political reform are carried out at lightning speed so that afterwards the energy measure can be approved at dawn,” the PRD leader told his fellow senators, adding that the PRI and PAN have been negotiating in secret.

A senator from the PAN said on Thursday that his party and the government have agreed to new clauses aimed at an eventual opening up of the oil industry.

Political reform is the next hurdle the PRI government must clear in Congress before the petroleum industry overhaul is discussed. Approval of the energy reform is considered by many to be Peña Nieto’s biggest goals.

Zambrano said that Peña Nieto and the PRI have not acted on the left’s demands for a powerful central election board and for more citizen involvement in organizing and monitoring local elections.