Eduardo Verástegui’s kabuki
Eduardo Verástegui at a CPAC conference in February 2024. Image credit: Associated Press/ Alex Brandon.
By David Agren, writer at large.
Eduardo Verástegui, the telenovela actor-turned-conservative influencer and MAGA movement regular, announced the formation of a political party to contest the 2027 midterm elections.
He followed the announcement with a stream of hyperbolic posts on X, featuring his standard screeds on abortion, wokeism and the UN’s Sustainable Development Agenda – all far from being top-of-mind issues for Mexican voters. He also indulged his usual pieties such as Our Lady of Guadalupe, posting an AI-generated photo of him and Donald Trump (ever the unpopular figure in Mexico) praying to La Virgencita, the national patroness on her Dec. 12 feast day. And he targeted the Mexican opposition as much as the ruling Morena party, while largely sparing President Claudia Sheinbaum and her predecessor, Andrés Manuel López Obrador (AMLO).
The party would ostensibly occupy a space covered by the National Action Party. The PAN, which is officially pro-life in its statutes, has attracted everyone from the far-right to urban cosmopolitans. But it’s been diminished in recent years by infighting, feckless governance and the rise of the ruling Morena party.
Founding a new party to compete in the 2027 midterm elections is a quixotic quest for Verástegui. Mexico’s existing parties enacted high barriers to entry, effectively preserving their generous public subsidies from new participants. The formation of new parties is a colossal undertaking, which can only occur during the midterms. This effectively denies new parties a presidential candidate at the top of the ticket to pull in votes. Morena was the last party to be formed in 2014, and was helped by AMLO’s name recognition and constant campaigning.
The bid to form a new party follows Verástegui’s ill-fated attempt at running in 2024 as an independent candidate. The Tamaulipas native brought name recognition as a telenovela star. But he barely collected 15% of the necessary signatures. He blamed that on the National Electoral Institute (INE) and its app for independent candidates, which he claims was buggy.
Verástegui still blames the INE for his failures. He channeled AMLO in attacking the INE, copying the former president’s claims of fraud. But a source familiar with Verástegui’s independent campaign said he spent much of the period for signature collection in Miami rather than Mexico City. The source added that Verástegui no-showed campaign events. In other words: he was missing in action from his own campaign.
Somewhat fittingly, Verástegui announced his newest political venture from … Argentina, in a speech at the Conservative Political Action Conference (CPAC). He played the victim card in the announcement, claiming, “They blocked us everywhere.” He then said – not incorrectly – “the only way to participate in politics in my country is through the building of a political party.” That was presumably the same conclusion that AMLO came to prior to founding Morena.
Verástegui, however, is no AMLO. The latter had spent decades building a political movement prior to winning office in 2018. AMLO, though, has somewhat conservative social mores. That explains why he never pushed the abortion issue – something advanced by the courts to nationwide decriminalization. It also explains why AMLO could build a movement incorporating everyone from Evangelicals to feminists, though he subsequently clashed with the latter.
But Mexican political parties and politicians largely don’t campaign on hot-button social issues. And Mexicans hold a deep contempt for clergy – especially Catholic clergy – meddling in politics. Church officials tried to claim post-hoc in 2016 that voters routed the Institutional Revolutionary Party in state elections over then-president Enrique Peña Nieto’s proposal to enshrine marriage equality in the constitution. Analysts say, however, there was no way to prove that claim.
The director of a pro-life organization once told me that pro-life voters are dispersed among Mexico’s political parties, making abortion a hard issue to campaign on. But Verástegui plans to try. Or so we think.
It’s hard to know what kind of influence Verástegui has, though several sources suspect he’s content to play a spoiler role – someone dividing the opposition to the benefit of Morena. His discourse seems niche, speaking more to foreign conservatives than the Mexican electorate. Take his acidic response to journalist León Krauze warning of the possible appointment of failed Arizona senate candidate Kari Lake as US ambassador to Mexico:
“Lefty, globalist, woke, progre, arborist, promotor of gender ideology, climate deception and the 2030 agenda.”
Verástegui’s discourse and his half-assed attempt at registering as an independent presidential candidate suggest that he’s more interested in self-promotion than becoming a serious political player. But it keeps alive the fiction that he peddles to US conservatives that he’s a presidential contender in Mexico. It’s kabuki. But it’s an undoubtedly effective side-hustle to boost his day job as an influencer in other parts of the Americas.