Macario Schettino and Jorge Castañeda are right: there is no point in discussing in depth the electoral reform that the President sent to Congress. It is a dead initiative. It does not have the votes for a qualified majority in both chambers. The opposition has no incentive to approve what López Obrador is proposing. Especially when they continue to brand them “traitors to the country” for having rejected the electricity reform.
In reality, as Castañeda says, AMLO’s new initiative is “one more distraction from the government to focus the national debate on insignificant technicalities, instead of focusing on the pathetic set of real results of the almost 4 years of government” .
So I will not get into analyzing the proposals of the AMLO initiative (I already did it with the idea of supposedly democratically electing the INE councilors and the TEPJF magistrates, which can be read here: https://www.excelsior.com. mx/opinion/leo-zuckermann/que-chare/1507721). What interests me is to underline the gangsterism and chutzpá of the presidential initiative.
I start with ganglandism, a word that does not exist in Spanish according to the Royal Academy of the Spanish Language. It is a Mexicanism that means “abuse or tendency to abuse their physical strength or their authority to take advantage of others.” Some of its synonyms are “advantageous, abuser, bully, arrogant.”
The reform proposed by AMLO is that of a gangster who abuses his power to exclude those who do not think like him. He neither wants nor intends to negotiate the rules of the democratic game with the opposition. Let us remember that this has been the tradition of political-electoral reforms since the 1990s: that all the players design and define, by consensus, the institutions that allow fair and plural competition; a game that anyone can win and there is alternation as has been the case in Mexico since 1997.
Quite the opposite in this case. The gangster wants to keep everything: the electoral institutions and both chambers of Congress. If it prospers, which will not happen, the President would control the electoral authorities and, the next Executive, the Legislative with super majorities to reform the Constitution.
Without modesty, AMLO aspires to tip the field in favor of López Hernández, Sheinbaum or Ebrard to win the Presidency in 2024 and not face any type of opposition in Congress. This is how the so-called “Fourth Transformation” would be crowned, which for them is a Revolution, and, as Bertrand de Jouvenel said: “revolutions either serve to concentrate power or they are useless”.
In the best Mexican tradition, AMLO wants to gang up on the institutions in order to concentrate his power and that of his successors. By the way, the political gangster denotes an attitude that feels weak and wants to abuse to prevail. Do those of the 4T feel so weak towards 2024 that they have to resort to the gangsterism of the institutions?
I pass to the second word that does not exist in Spanish. It comes from Yiddish and is also used in American English. I mean chutzpah. It is a mixture of meanings that include “boldness, insolence, daring, impudence, impudence, shamelessness, incredible guts, conceit and arrogance”. The attitude of someone who is willing to do anything to get their way. In this sense, there is good chutzpah and bad chutzpah, depending on the objective.
AMLO’s initiative belongs to the latter. These gentlemen came to power, and have more and more, thanks to the current electoral rules. Now, cheekily, brazenly and shamelessly, they propose to modify them to avoid alternation because, as the President has clearly said, we must avoid, at all costs, that the actions of his government are thrown back; that in the future no one can change social policy, the health system or privatize some of its emblematic works such as the Mayan Train, for example.
But democracy serves to modify things that are not working. If a majority of voters think that it is time for the treasury to stop losing money subsidizing a train and it is better for private initiative to take it, why not allow it? Well, because of the arrogance of feeling like the last Coca-Cola in the desert. This justifies, for them, the audacity to change the political-electoral rules in order to eliminate those who think and have different solutions. A typical case of bad chutzpah.
#Gandallism #chutzpá