Political Entrepreneurship
Diego Martín Velázquez Caballero
According to Maurice Duverger, partisan perspectives in electoral systems with a majority tendency lean toward bipartisanship or bipolarism. Probably from this perspective we can understand Pedro Kumamoto's action to associate his independent political formation, as well as the embryo of a political party that he tried to form, with the National Regeneration Movement.
Political factionalism in Latin America has come to generate a phenomenon known as political entrepreneurship and which, before the connotation involved in the economy, implied the construction of partisan institutes, clubs, gatherings, organizations or movements to exercise a veto or blackmail capacity in the political system. Factionalism and political entrepreneurship are conditions that distinguish Third World political systems. In the case of Latin America, there are unique nations in terms of the number – more nominal than real – of political parties that come to exist. Both elements also make up a weak public administration and a state regime hijacked by different factions.
In Mexico, before the formation of the PRI, the number of political parties reached thousands and political movements such as Maderismo promoted such a number of expectations that, upon taking power, they were simply impossible to meet.
Guatemala, Peru, Colombia, Argentina and Brazil have been the spaces of study regarding political entrepreneurship, the consequences of the high fragmentation that the party system reaches is noticeable in the type of governability and institutionality that subsists in the political regime.
The loss of power in the PRI generated the departure of the multiple tendencies that made it up and the phenomenon of bleeding does not seem to stop now in all political parties. Morena summons multiple tendencies, factions and political entrepreneurs because it is the party in government, it is true that there is a manifest transfer of currents, tendencies, caudillismos, cacicazgos and factions towards its organizational content; However, National Regeneration has not been able to develop the level of political institutionality that the PRI had and it is difficult for it to contain such a level of political entrepreneurship when the wind blows against it. Factionalism and political entrepreneurship are the ideal breeding ground for pragmatic opportunism that most damages a society.
Some political scientists propose the need for more draconian electoral laws to close the door to so many fallacious organizations that seek to disguise themselves as political parties to exercise patrimonialism; However, others consider that participation is necessary to stimulate leadership that coheres and generates social capital. The truth is that the crisis of political parties seems to have no way out in Mexico and the world. The French case provides evidence that well-designed electoral engineering is not enough for mythomaniacs like Emmanuel Macron to come to power. Politics increasingly poses ethical dilemmas with enormous consequences because political organizations have been emptied of their content and a way to replace them has not yet been discovered. Everyone looks at Xavier Milei with sympathy, but no one wants to be under his insane rule.
Morena and Kumamoto establish a strategic alliance that can be beneficial for both actors and the state of Jalisco; However, in other entities and at the national level, some candidates and alliances will condemn Morena for immediatism. Political parties do not seem to have a solution, the old discussion of parliamentarism versus presidentialism is still waiting for the moment to be raised when the party crisis is terminal. And we will turn again to France to discover that even a double-engine government is insufficient to contain traitorous politicians. At the time.