He political speech by López Obrador during his campaign for the presidency in 2018 was based on the proposal formal of a regime change that could set the criteria for a new general national transformation similar to what occurred in 1810 with Independence, in 1855 with the Reform and in 1910 with the Revolution. The intention was ambitiousbut the balance must be measured in the lack of a real project for the rupture of the system/regime/State/Constitution.
From the National Palace he achieved Republic President keep alive a speechbut with scopes real very limited while it played with the rules of the regime, unlike the three previous transformations: Independence annihilated the Spanish regime, the Reformation destroyed Catholic conservatism and the Revolution founded a new social State.
The presidential decisions, not being strictly revolutionary in terms of the transformation, basically depended on the non-existent absolute legislative majority and some agreements with the opposition for a qualified majority that could change some articles of the Constitution referring to social welfare.
In this context, the 4-T was not a transformation similar to the previous ones, but it barely achieved viable legislative reforms. The Belisario Domínguez Institute of the Senate has just highlighted that the López Obrador Government’s performance in passing laws was very lower than the previous ones, but it must be clarified that it was not due to lack of will but because it wanted to introduce reforms with an absolute majority ( 51% of legislators) some that could only be approved with a qualified majority (67%). In any case, the legislative balance was outstanding because it led the opposition to vote for a social subsidy policy that returned to public welfare spending.
The most aggressive parts of the reforms proposed by the López Obrador Government had to do with three central points: the restoration of centralist presidentialism, the change in configuration and domination of ministers of the Supreme Court of Justice and the deactivation of the autonomous bodies of the State that were invented by Carlos Salinas de Gortari’s model of an autonomous State of social commitments and that created a caste of officials – the civil servant – appointed by the federal government-majority of parties symbiosis and who were alien to any commitment to the society.
These reforms did not achieve a change of regime, except for the proposal to elect the ministers of the Court by popular vote in an act more of participatory democracy than the creation of a new State regime. The return to the presidential economy in the manner explained in 1987 by the essayist Gabriel Zaid did not modify the structure of the regime either, but rather it further energized the presidential system that had been exhausted with Echeverría and López Portillo due to the pharaohism of increasingly disorganized and deficit public spending. with a serious and negative impact on inflation and of course the exchange rate.
The 4-T speech was rather an alternative program to that of a Salinist liberalism that operated from 1983 to 2018, which achieved macroeconomic stability at the cost of affecting the social well-being of 80% of the national population and that did not modify the productive structure and left the productive assembly model that the Free Trade Agreement established because they could not promote a new modern productive plant and that left a disastrous legacy of 60% of the economically active population as an informal economy.
The problem that the López Obrador project could not solve in practice was that of the economic limits of the State-Government due to the structure of traditional tax revenues, with the government’s refusal due to pressure from the IMF to increase the monetary circulation or start the machine. of money printing that in the past produced inflation and therefore the limits on tax revenue were barely enough to finance the works of the presidential economy.
In this context, one cannot speak of a second floor of the 4-T if the first was left in black work, without functionality to operate and with dysfunctional lags.
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#regime #leadership
