In March 2018, the candidate Andrés Manuel López Obrador left the attendees at the National Banking Convention cold. “If the elections are fair, they are free, I am going to Palenque,” he said. “If they dare to commit electoral fraud, I am also going to Palenque and see who will tie up the tiger. The one who releases the tiger to tie it up; I am not going to be arresting people after electoral fraud.” The statement was taken as a threat of violence if he did not win the presidential election, and although he denied that interpretation days later, no one believed him because his political biography is full of social pressure and political extortion in every election he lost in the past. .
This January 4, that threat revived in a different body and at a radically different time. López Obrador is President of the Republic, not an opposition leader, and a tiger like the one he threatened, is no longer an errant and anarchic political body, but one that can be manipulated from the National Palace. “Helping the poor is safe, because he already knows that when you need to defend yourself, in this case the transformation, you have their support,” he said. “Not so with the sectors of the middle class, nor with those at the top, nor with the media, nor with the intelligentsia. So, it is not a personal matter, it is a matter of political strategy”.
López Obrador recognized what he has always denied. His social programs are not part of a public policy to improve the well-being of those who have less -as he presumes-, nor to solve the problem of poverty -which has worsened during his six-year term-, but as an electoral strategy to generate clienteles that vote by those who indicate, or can be mobilized to the streets, in case their candidates do not succeed at the polls. There is no longer deceit, nor sneaky declarations. The riddle has disappeared.
Since yesterday, the strategy began to be implemented. The Welfare Secretariat, through the bank created by the regime for patronage purposes, began to distribute more money among the most needy. It began with the elderly, who in alphabetical order will receive their pension with an increase of 25% over the next six days, which will gradually increase until next year, when the presidential election is held. At the same time, the president called the Secretary of Labor, Luisa María Alcalde, to account, with the aim of resuscitating the failed Youth Building the Future program, another electoral breeding ground.
The resources for social programs are inexhaustible, and the Ministry of Finance, as the president also ordered to do with the financing for the construction of the Dos Bocas refinery, will have to come up with more adjustments to public spending, reduction in the bureaucracy’s payroll , greater efficiency in tax collection, albeit with intimidation tactics, and the dehydration of the economy in general. There is no issue that matters more to the president than these two. One because of his youthful whim of having a refinery, and the other because he cannot leave open any possibility that Morena will lose the presidential election, because he is certain that his nation project would be truncated.
That is why his statement on Wednesday morning is so revealing, which also produces chills, when López Obrador begins to remove his mask. His old call to action of “the poor first” is not an ethical and social justice position, but a strategy to convert that segment of the population, through the charm of his word, into a voting machine.
In the 2018 presidential election, the BGC company headed by Ulises Beltrán conducted an exit poll that revealed that although López Obrador had a majority of votes in all sectors by income strata, they were the least favored sectors – with incomes of less than to two thousand 500 pesos a month- those who supported him the most (53%), followed by those who earn less than eight thousand pesos (46.6%).
López Obrador understands his electorate very well and knows what springs he can pull to keep them loyal. The narrative that there are groups of privileged classists and racists who hate the poor and who want to prevent them from continuing to support them with direct resources, becomes plausible if it is accompanied by the growing injection of money that is reaching that group of the population. . Generalities lead to errors or lies in the conclusions, but the president’s simple, direct and repetitive speech, regardless of the veracity of its content, has been successful.
The underlying problem is not that it seeks to consolidate this electoral clientele -other parties have tried before, sometimes successfully and other times not-, but rather that it intends to use them as cannon fodder in the event that even with their vote those who compete for Morena. He outlined it in the morning when he expressed his confidence that by distributing money directly, “when it is necessary to defend, in this case the transformation.”
If he trusts that it will be a group that he can call to mobilize in the event of a defeat for Morena at the polls, we can imagine that in defense of his project -and therefore his significance-, López Obrador will risk everything with everything. He will no longer be the threat of the tiger that he brought out before the bankers in 2018, but the warning to the opposition, institutions and counterweights, what will he do if he loses the presidential election, that is, take the people to the streets to generate instability and ungovernability.
The scenarios for the presidential election in 2024 have to incorporate this eventuality, so the intellectual and political challenge for the opposition is not only how they can defeat it, but how they can prevent the chaos that their clinging to power would generate, equivalent to a self-coup, to rule from the shadows. The real problem is not the election, but the day after.
Mail: [email protected]
Twitter: @rivapa
#enigma #López #Obrador