Defections begin in Mexico's main Leftist party

Fifty members of the Democratic Revolutionary Party (PRD) from northern Mexico resigned from the party on 29-30 September and were to join the civic movement led by Andrés Manuel López Obrador, the former PRD leader who failed to win the presidency in July 2012. The move confirmed fears that López Obrador's split with the PRD after the general elections could divide the party and realign the Left. The 50 were from the state of Nuevo León and their departure was ostensibly in protest at the PRD's "anti-democratic" practice of appointing electoral candidates, CNN and Notimex reported. One defector, Roberto Benavides González, told Notimex that up to 200 party members could leave. Their destination would be the Movimiento de Regeneración Nacional (MORENA), a "civil association" that may become a formal political party before the next presidential elections. López Obrador and many on the Left vigorously challenged the results of the 2012 elections, though critics have claimed his populist style as candidate may have dissuaded some middle-class voters from voting for the Left and cost it the elections. Another recent defector, original party signatory and former parliamentarian Lenia Batres declared on 30 September that the PRD was now a "bureaucratic structure" with limited popular support. She told the website ADNPolítico that the PRD's leader Jesús Zambrano Grijalva had neglected the PRD's "political project" to maintain the unity of "jostling" factions that often had "absolutely opposed interests;" the PRD she said had thus "lost its way. It had a good idea of the country but was taken over by people who may not be of the Left. That is why we are going to Morena." Morena is to hold a congress in November, where it may decide whether or not to become a party. The PRD was founded in 1989 in a split from the governing Institutional Revolutionary Party.