For no one, at this time, it is unknown that Andres Manuel Lopez Obrador has the existential need to transcend as the best president that you have had Mexico. Objectively speaking, up to this point in the six-year term, it will not be, if we stick to the results. But objectively speaking from the definition of success that he has imposed on himself, he is doing very well, with high popularity ratings, where the way he fails in almost all the public politics, has not contaminated it. His charisma and legitimacy have power, but without a doubt that the construction of the narrative in the morningsis the reason for being at the pinnacle of positive perceptions.
His commanding presence in the public arena and mornings will disappear when he hands over the presidential sash and the popularity he enjoys today will begin to fade. The Spanish saying of “eyes that do not see, heart that does not feel” is wise. Lopez Obrador he knows. He needs to transcend the six-year term even if he is not sitting in the presidential chair.
He has given us compelling political evidence: he chose candidates for the presidential candidacy, he administered the disclosures, he regulated the times of his campaigns, he established the candidate selection method and he set the date to anoint him. He has already set the campaign themes and the program that he must follow to consolidate his fourth transformation. If he doesn’t do it, that’s why he put the revocation of mandate in the Constitution. But it’s not enough.
Lopez Obrador you need to continue the narrative. And from this year they got down to work. Last December, Beatriz Gutierrez Mullerthe president’s wife, formed a team of approximately 20 people so that, coordinated by her, they write a book of memories of López Obrador, which will be incorporated into free textbooks, as part of the trans-exenal narrative that will be delivered labeled to who succeeds him, who will equate the scope of the fourté with the Independencethe Reform and the Revolution. Many have already written about how ambitious, and absurd in scope, to compare oneself with those moments that changed national history, but far from undermining the president’s spirits, it stimulates him.
The capitulation is not yet known, but it will not be a surprise either. Every morning she repeats it: how she has faced the corruption, how he has banished her from his government, is a central theme; how she has removed privileges and has benefited the poor, is another; Since he built an authentically democratic country and destroyed second-generation democratic institutions that they say are hindrances, there will be no lack of it, nor will the chapter dedicated to the media and journalists, where one could imagine as part of his odyssey that he will once again be compared with Francisco I. Madero to say that no president had ever been so attacked since then, like him. And how he beat him.
The idea of the memoirs is a more refined idea than what the president originally wanted when he appointed Delfina Gomez as Secretary of Education, which was to incorporate into the free textbooks the fight that he says he has undertaken against corruption and social inequality, which they wanted to place in the context of the achievements so that those who read it understand the magnitude of the scope of the fourteen in the history of Mexico. This is not going to be possible, once again, according to the results. Seen quantitatively, to focus on those two issues, there are more people in the president’s entourage involved in corruption scandals than in any previous government, and inequality has grown, not reduced, with growth in the number of extreme poor compared to those that were in 2018.
The reality does not give him to tell his odyssey, but the narrative that in the end endures. López Obrador’s bet is not new either. His government has focused on propaganda. However, there is propaganda to propaganda. The one that developed the PRI, for example, was generally ineffective due to lack of credibility and the lack of a figure to evangelize with manipulations. the one of Lopez Obrador it is quite the opposite: very effective and gives it enormous power to make decisions and be accepted by a good part of the population, which it manages to influence through psychological manipulations. It is no coincidence that López Obrador’s main supporters are among the population with a lower educational level, since it has been widely proven that the higher the education, the greater the skepticism towards dogmatic approaches that lack evidence.
But López Obrador’s propaganda is finite: the last day of September, if he holds a morning on the last business day of his six-year term. From then on he will be left without the setting of the National Palace and the resources of his government to magnify his narrative through the public radio and television system. This is where the trans-exenal strategic part comes from, with the elaboration of the memories that allow to prop up what they call in the environment of the president “the transcendence” of his transformation.
Of this, history tells us other cases. Mao Zedong’s “little red book” had quotes from the Chinese chairman who was catechism for the Cultural Revolution. Muammar Gaddafi had his “green book”, which gave a political, economic and social body to the Jamahiriya, which means the state of the masses, which was used as the Constitution in Libya. In a very different sphere, Jackeline Kennedy, in the midst of mourning the assassination of John F. Kennedy, gave a long interview to the historian William Manchester that was published in “Look” magazine, and later became a book, from which it emerged. the myth of the “thousand days of Camelot”, which made the president’s truncated term idyllic.
The narrative is something that many have sought to perpetuate. Some succeed, like Kennedy thanks to his wife, and others fail due to the infeasibility of their projects, like Gaddafi. The bet on the memory of López Obrador is that, a bet, that only time will show if his narrative endured or failed.
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