President Andrés Manuel López Obrador entered the final stretch of his government with his face painted for war and clearly defined which troops he is going to fight with, to take his candidate to succeed him to the National Palace and to complete the transformation that began . His plan of action is transparent, even if he doesn’t say so. Claudia Sheinbaum will be the presidential candidate, unless something extraordinary happens in the next 18 months, and he will be the campaign manager, formally or informally. Behind him, ready for the campaign, is the hard sector of López Obrador, because radicalization and polarization are the axis of the strategy to maintain power.
There is nothing to be surprised about because there is nothing new. At the beginning of the last stretch of his government, the priority is the consolidation of his base electorate -around 15 million voters- and the atomization of the opposition. Sheinbaum does not have the capacity to comply with these two premises for victory, so the old dependency on López Obrador will continue and, given the challenges ahead, will deepen. The hows are the only thing that will have to be accommodated depending on the situation and the performance of the dolphin.
The conditions that will surround the final outcome of the candidacy and the ties that the president makes for Sheinbaum will depend on factors outside the scope of the chosen one. The most important has to do with the economic variable. The Bank of Mexico reported on Wednesday that economic growth for this year will remain at the expected 2.2%, but it adjusted downwards the expectation for the next one, placing it at 1.6%. In other words, there will be a significant slowdown that there will be no way to reverse.
The presidential mega-projects are constantly increasing their costs, particularly Dos Bocas and the Mayan Train, which are drying up public finances due to subsidies, and due to the lack of private investment, decreased collection and cuts in public spending. The spaces for political maneuver continue to shrink and it is not clear where the money will come from for social programs, essential to keep electoral clients oiled.
The possibility that the president reaches into the international reserves or the Afores does not seem likely. Nor does Sheinbaum grow up on her own as a candidate. The success of the candidate at the polls depends only on López Obrador, whose strength lies in his popularity. According to the president’s monthly approval survey published yesterday by El Financiero, support remains stable, at a solid 54%. This popular support has not been affected by the management of the government, where the negatives continue to grow, and the president seems to be vaccinated against his own mistakes.
López Obrador has been firing shells at the opposition to divide them and put them to fight, seeking their atomization. The Va por México alliance has said that the president will not achieve his goal, but he has plenty of time to insist on the fracture of this broad opposition front, which would only have the possibility of having a competitive candidacy if it is unified, as the Buendía survey showed. and Márquez published this week, where if they were under a single bet PAN, PRI, PRD and Movimiento Ciudadano, they would currently be in 35% of electoral preference, against 49% of the coalition of Morena, PT and Verde.
These numbers can be moved depending on the economic situation that prevails in a year and a half, but they will also be altered when Sheinbaum’s opponents come out. Therein lies the strategic importance of López Obrador to remain in power, through this intermediary route, and whose activism will have to be defined based on the behavior of the variables.
López Obrador is an unpredictable person and extraordinary solutions to extraordinary challenges. With him you always have to be thinking under categories other than those known. In this way, it can be proposed as a working hypothesis that in the face of a presidential candidacy that does not win and faces adverse social and economic conditions, López Obrador could stop being an informal campaign manager and become a formal one, which would lead him to something that today seems unthinkable, but that some experts in electoral politics are considering: that he ask for a license to go direct Sheinbaum’s campaign.
López Obrador has not been comfortable with Sheinbaum in recent weeks because he thinks that the problems that have arisen, he has not handled them properly, for which he has sent calls for attention. However, at no time has he shown signs of a change in the decision for him to succeed. If his approval is maintained, the voting preference for the government coalition and the eventual lack of a strong opposition candidacy, the president’s considerations would be of a different nature.
The second scenario with which he has flirted in recent weeks is to walk towards an electoral reform negotiated with the PRI, to take advantage of one of the tricolor’s proposals that, without probably having thought of it that way when they presented it, suits the purposes of López Obrador: the figure of the vice presidency, which would compete in formula with the presidential candidacy and would be elected for the same term. What he would have to achieve is, in a secondary law, that the revocation of the mandate be exclusive to the chief executive, not to the vice presidency.
López Obrador has both ways to stay in power, without being in power. In the first scenario, Maximato would be the name of the game, and in the second, the permanent threat that if he deviates from the transformation project, he will correct the path with dismissal. Sheinbaum belongs to the hard core of López Obrador and is seen by him as the legitimate heir to the president. The war began for her, but above all, for López Obrador and her legacy.
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