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The Mexican electoral authorities are preparing a team to manage and eventually liquidate the assets of the Social Encounter Party (PES) and the New Alliance Party (PANAL), which ran in coalition with President-elect Lopez Obrador's National Renewal Movement (Morena), as they didn't pass the three percent threshold in the recent July 1 general elections.
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In order to keep their registration, parties must obtain three percent of the popular vote in at least one of the three federal elections. As neither the PES nor PANAL got enough votes in the Senate, House of Representatives or presidential elections, they will be gone by the end of the year.
But the PES got only 2.7 percent of the votes in the presidential election, 2.4 in the House of Representatives and 2.32 in the Senate.
Meanwhile, the PANAL got 0.99 in the presidential elections, 2.47 in the House of Representatives and 2.32 in the Senate.
The PES, a socially conservative and economically liberal party, ran in coalition with the center-left Morena, which has been established as the new political force with a landslide victory in the elections and became the biggest party in both legislative houses.
However, even though the coalition “Together We Will Make History” included Morena, PES and the center-left Work Party (PT), most voters only marked Morena on the ballots, leaving aside the conservative party with which many didn't sympathize.
“We will first designate the comptroller, who is a previous figure to the liquidator, as established by the law. That comptroller will be in charge of administering the party and to establish the basis for the liquidation once it's confirmed in the tribunals, as we must still review the appeals filed by the staff,” Marco Antonio Baños Martinez, electoral councilor, told the newspaper Reforma.
Already having partial results, the PES and other parties were in danger of disappearing. But Hugo Eric Flores, head of the PES, said the party would wait until the very last moment, when all the ballots had been officially counted and registered, to recognize “the will of the citizens.”
Flores had hope because, according to him, the PES had more than 3 percent of the votes in all exit polls.
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“We demand a detailed revision of the nullified votes and a legal redistribution of the votes of the Together We Will Make History coalition, because the voters and polling station officials were very confused and nullified our votes when they were totally valid,” said Flores.
The PES was a small party in Mexico's political sphere, with virtually no popularity among voters. They ran on a conservative, anti-abortion anti-LGBT rights platform, and hoped to join the big scene by joining Morena on the latest elections. However, that was not enough.
The electoral tribunal has August 31 as its deadline to review the parties' appeals, when they will rule if they lose registration or not. But this doesn't mean they will be gone from the political sphere.
Mexico's legislative branches are elected by a relative majority (300 in the House of Representatives and 96 in the Senate) and by proportional representation (200 in the House of Representatives and 32 in the Senate).
Parties that lost their registration are able to keep their candidates elected by relative majority, but lose their right to proportional representation, which is distributed among remaining parties.
When it's gone, the PES will keep 55 representatives and seven senators, while the PANAL will have two representatives and no senators.
The elected candidates won't have the right to make their own legislative blocks, but will be able to join other ones.
Other parties such as the Revolutionary Democratic Party, which was close to wining the previous two presidential elections, the Mexican Green Ecologist Party and the Citizen Movement were close to losing their registry, but managed to get more than 3 percent in the legislative branches.
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