Yesterday two people won the presidential election. Claudia Sheinbaum won victory at the polls and Andrés Manuel López Obrador he won his plebiscite. Sheinbaum, the first woman to assume the Presidency of a sexist and misogynistic country, triumphed with and despite the support of López Obrador, crowning a campaign without fundamental errors. López Obrador, who began his campaign for the referendum since he began his six-year term and accelerated it 24 hours after the midterm elections, must feel satisfied: his polarization and propaganda strategy was successful. His candidate won at the polls and, as he established, she will finish what she started. Only after the earrings, will she be able to govern as she wishes.
Sheinbaum won by the points he needed for an alignment in the electorate like the one that occurred in 2018, when Lopez Obrador He won in all segments and in all possible intersections, with 53% of the vote, higher than that of all his opponents combined. It doesn’t seem like there was any difference on this occasion. As the exit polls are published, it will be possible to see the behavior of the segments in this election and confirm the impact of social programs on the lowest income groups, the expected rejection of the middle classes and the highest income classes.
However, without detracting from the professionalism he showed in his campaign, his victory is thanks to Lopez Obrador. The morning fulfilled its purpose. The spectacular data from Gallup, the respected international pollster, which last week placed him with an approval rating of 80%, is proof of how the daily exercise of propaganda and attack on his critics managed to make millions of Mexicans see the individual more than the president. , and to transfer their support to Sheinbaum to continue with the policies of the most inefficient, incapable, and probably the most corrupt government in decades.
Lopez Obrador He is guaranteed that his projects will be completed, with which he hopes to cement his Gobbelian transcendence, where he will be remembered through monumental works.
Sheinbaum has to finish them and make the “Felipe Ángeles” airport functional, not only because the president asked for it, but because unlike him, there are no resources that he can squander so absurdly and irresponsibly, as Lopez Obrador did it with the Texcoco airport.
As of today there are two powers, the formal one of Lopez Obrador and the factual Sheinbaum. It will naturally move from National Palace to the transition house of the winning candidate, but it is clear that the president will not be the wimp that Enrique Peña Nieto was, and that he will govern until his last day, unlike his predecessor who gave up on the first day after the election.
This does not mean that Sheinbaum, with victory at the polls, a demarcation will begin. He probably won’t even when he leaves Congress with the presidential sash. After seeing the strength of López Obrador despite all his failures in government management, any hint of patricide would be a political error. Sheinbaum will be the president with the deepest mark of her predecessor since the times of Plutarco Elías Calles and Pascual Ortíz Rubio, and although the succession has been similar to that of Miguel de la Madrid with Carlos Salinas, the conditions are absolutely different: López Obrador does not He has the political neatness of De la Madrid, nor does Sheinbaum have the autonomy of Salinas.
These conditions do not seem to be changing substantially with the rest of this Sunday’s results, some of which are controversial and with the possibility of reaching the courts, so attention will now turn to the composition of the Chamber of Deputies and the Senate, where the bet of the president and at least in declarative terms also of Sheinbaum, is for a qualified majority that allows the initiatives that López Obrador is expected to send in the 90 days that he has left of constitutional power, such as that of the Judiciary and security, to pass no problem.
The initiatives are controversial and Sheinbaum He already had warnings of this, particularly with the reform of the Judiciary. Members of his campaign remember that in every meeting he held with businessmen and members of the international community, this reform was the one at the center of the dialogue and, in most cases, the only one on the agenda that they carried
The winning candidate, who has since stopped talking about this reform in public, would be better off, thinking about the needs she will have to manage a country with a chained and limited budget, that there would be no qualified majority and that this reform would be kicked forward, taking away a point of friction with the president who does not see the objective political needs of Sheinbaumbut that his obsessions and fixations are fulfilled as he demands.
Sheinbaum, unlike other presidential winners, does not have enough support to expand his margins of maneuver. He was not involved in the design of the timing or the agenda of her campaign, nor could he have much of a hand in the delivery of candidacies for governorships, deputies and senators. Most of those who won did so because Lopez Obrador, so loyalties, at least in the agony of the six-year term and the start of the next administration, are for him, not for her. Furthermore, López Obrador now wants him to repeat practically the entire cabinet to show continuity, forcing Sheinbaum to make a quick decision.
Therein lies the dilemma that she will face from now on when she is virtual president. Her victory at the polls was shared with Lopez Obrador, Although it was the president who, with his design of delivering massive money to buy votes, the systematic attacks against the opposition and the media, and the regular violations of electoral laws, must feel that he owes so much, that he has to comply fully.
The president will consider that the two-headed victory in the election has to translate into two-headed power, and Sheinbaum You will face the challenge of how to avoid it without confronting it.
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