The reappearance of a man who has just defeated cancer has achieved what seemed difficult: reunifying the leadership of a political party that seemed bankrupt for more than two years and which today is the second largest opposition political force in Mexico. Dante Delgado Ranauro (Veracruz, 1950) attracted the attention of those attending the Cabañas de Guadalajara Museum, where last Thursday the governor of the Citizens’ Movement of Jalisco, Pablo Lemus, held his first management report. Having lost weight due to stomach cancer from which he had been suffering for more than a year, Delgado posed smiling for the cameras dressed in an orange jacket and a checked cap, wearing a goatee and his characteristic thick glasses, which contrasted with the thin face of someone who has lost 40 kilos in 10 months.
His reappearance occurred in Jalisco, the first state in which the Citizens’ Movement won a governorship (in 2018), cradle of the party’s largest current and the main internal critics of the current national leader, Jorge Álvarez Máynez, who assumed control in December 2024, after Dante Delgado was diagnosed and announced his retirement from political life.
Delgado, who maintains the position of president of the National Commission of Conventions and Internal Processes in MC, was emotional during the Lemus report event exuding good humor; he answered all the questions local journalists asked him, he asked dozens of them selfies and announced that he had managed to defeat cancer, after a delicate operation and treatment that lasted almost a year.
With the message of his return to politics, Dante also outlined the strategic path that the Orange party will follow in the coming months: to compete without alliances in the 2027 federal elections and consolidate by 2030 as the second political alternative after Morena, which would imply the ousting of the PAN and the PRI, the longest-standing parties in the Mexican political system, which are currently in opposition.
The bet on oneself is a programmatic line adopted by Dante Delgado’s party since the last six years, when it refused to join the broad opposition front formed by PAN, PRI and PRD in both 2021 and 2024. The strategy has produced ambivalent results: it maintains MC as the third territorial force, governing Jalisco and Nuevo León, two of the most populous states in the country, behind only Morena and the PAN. But it has not borne the same fruit in the Houses of Congress, where their benches are made up of only six senators out of 128 and 28 out of 500 representatives.
The photo of the unit will be repeated in Monterrey
In the first rows of the auditorium where Pablo Lemus presented his government report, Dante Delgado sat around him the coordinator of the MC, Jorge Álvarez Máynez; to the governor of Nuevo León, Samuel García; Senator Luis Donaldo Colosio Riojas; to the former candidate for the government of Mexico City Salomón Chertorivski and to the main exponents of the Jalisco rebel group: Senator Clemente Castañeda, the mayor of Guadalajara, Verónica Delgadillo, and the state coordinator of the MC, Mirza Flores.
The image of oranges grouped around their founder will be repeated on Sunday in Monterrey, Nuevo León, where Samuel García will present his fourth government report in an event to which he has summoned the same cast.
If the PAN had to explicitly relaunch itself to get back on the public agenda, the leadership of the MC decided to take advantage of the reports of its governors to present itself as a united party fighting towards the electoral dates of 2027 and 2030. “The Citizens’ Movement does not need to relaunch itself,” said Salomón Chertorivski, president of the Consultative Council. “All of us haven’t stopped meeting. The only one who hadn’t appeared publicly was Dante Delgado, for obvious reasons, but MC is united and in an upward spiral.”
Optimistic, Chertorivski said that the difference between MC and traditional parties (PAN and PRI) is that they have national figures who can grow by 2030, such as governors Pablo Lemus, of Jalisco, and Samuel García, of Nuevo León; Jorge Álvarez Máynez, who already ran a presidential campaign in 2024 and obtained 10% of the votes, and the former mayor of Monterrey, Luis Donaldo Colosio Riojas, who carries a powerful political brand in his surname. Furthermore, the Orange party boasts of having regional figures such as Juan Zepeda, in the State of Mexico; Verónica Delgadillo, in Jalisco, and Chertorivski himself, who maintains his political activism in the country’s capital.
Breakup and truce in Jalisco
The reunification of the MC comes after two years of tensions between the national leadership and the Jalisco group, previously led by former governor Enrique Alfaro, who since mid-2023 has made public his differences with the decisions made by Mexico City.
First, Alfaro criticized the decision to hastily announce that MC will not ally with the rest of the opposition to try to take power in Morena in the 2024 elections. “I am convinced that our movement should not have taken the path of isolation; we do not share the vision of the alliance as it has been proposed until now, but we also do not show the will to find a formula that works,” he said in July 2023, when PAN, PRI and PRD announced the formation of a front adversary from which MC immediately distanced himself.
Subsequently, he announced that he would not seek the presidential candidacy, leaving MC without one of its main prospects for 2024. Already in this critical path, Alfaro criticized the way in which the internal process that made Samuel García the sole candidate developed and encouraged a demonstration of Orange mayors and local deputies who accused Jalisco of having been excluded from national decisions.
He remained aloof while Samuel García began a failed pre-campaign that he had to suspend due to the conflict that triggered his license to the Congress of Nuevo León. And, in January 2024, when Jorge Álvarez Máynez’s presidential candidacy was finally announced, the governor of Jalisco thundered against MC, criticizing the way Samuel García “discovered” Máynez, at a table with snacks and beer. “I am very sorry for everything that happened, because I have enormous affection for this project and its people, and because I believe I had an important role in building what they are destroying today,” he declared in a message that served as a preamble to two campaigns that, although from the same party, have always been distant and contradictory: that of Máynez for the presidency and that of Lemus for the governorship of Jalisco.
In June 2024, Máynez lost, but left MC at its all-time high in national votes with 6.2 million votes. Pablo Lemus won the governorship with a minimal difference compared to Morena’s candidate, Claudia Delgadillo, and faced harsh electoral and media litigation before his victory was recognized. Differences between Jalisco and the national coordinator emerged again in December, when Dante Delgado fell ill, retired from politics and left the leadership to Álvarez Máynez. And they haven’t stopped since then.
Just in September, Álvarez Máynez suffered a notorious affront from the Jalisco militancy, when hundreds of participants in the state congress left the auditorium just as his speech began. In this context, Pablo Lemus’ report on Thursday and Samuel García’s report in Nuevo León next Sunday serve Máynez to show the image of a united party, even if, according to Jalisco militants, it is only a truce, as tensions continue. At the direction of Máynez, the Jalisco party continues to demand that they not be given positions in the National Coordinator and that local leaders are not taken into consideration in decision-making processes.
