Andrés Manuel López Obrador’s Mexico runs out and Claudia Sheinbaum’s opens. A double, albeit cautious, celebration is in order. First, because one of the harshest and most contradictory governments in recent decades will end and, especially, because for the first time a woman who is also a scientist and comes—not insignificant—from our Jewish community will arrive at the National Palace. It will be the end of an era—AMLO’s first campaign began when those who voted today for the first time were born—and the inevitable beginning of another. An incontestable majority has ended up approving the management of the so-called Fourth Transformation and has granted Sheinbaum all power.
After his victory in 2018, AMLO hardly took long to become someone different from the one who had competed three times for the presidential seat: his own dopplegänger. Following the populist ideology rehearsed elsewhere, he very soon put aside his speech of reconciliation – similar to the one Sheinbaum gave today – to invent an enemy with which to confront his entire six-year term: the “conservatives” – a term torn out, in his interested reading of history, from the 19th century—or “neoliberals”: a fictional category that included both his bitter rivals from the Institutional Revolutionary Party (PRI) and the National Action Party (PAN), as well as any citizen who dared to criticize his decisions. .
This omnipresent enemy allowed him to break away from any ideological ties and in particular from the more left-leaning tendencies of some of his followers. His identification with the nineteenth-century liberals, who were in no way socialist, led him to create a hybrid regime tailored to his personality. If, on the one hand, it articulated public policies aimed at combating inequality with a battery of direct support for the most vulnerable sectors and a commendable increase in minimum wages, on the other it adopted clearly conservative and neoliberal measures: extreme militarization; the absence of a tax reform that, in fact, benefited only the richest; disdain for human rights, culture, science or ecology; and dramatic budget cuts that reduced the State’s capacity for action in crucial areas such as education or health.
The flood of public resources delivered directly to the poorest – the focus of the 4T – gave it, as has been confirmed today, a colossal base of support: those millions forgotten by the PRI and the PAN are the ones that have awarded his huge victory to Sheinbaum. Unfortunately, the popularity
achieved with these actions, added to an exhausting campaign of propaganda and agitation, gave AMLO the necessary room for maneuver to betray the rest of the progressive agenda and build a pyramidal and increasingly authoritarian regime where dissent was banned. In an abysmal exercise in cognitive dissonance, overnight dozens of left-wing militants began to applaud the informal preventive detention, the concessions to the military or the ecological devastation.
Sheinbaum’s resounding victory reiterates both the deep discredit of the traditional political class and the extreme skill of López Obrador: by choosing a woman—and a woman who does come from the left—he deprived the opposition of many of its arguments and forced her to look, in extremis, for another woman capable of competing with her. The self-confidence and candidness of Xóchitl Gálvez, reluctantly accepted by the opposition leaders, were not enough to make her competitive. Worse: citizens seem to have granted the 4T a qualified majority in the chambers, which would allow AMLO, even before Sheinbaum takes office, to approve numerous constitutional reforms, including initiatives that further concentrate power, They threaten the poorest—with their punitive emphasis on drug dealing—or expand the catalog of informal preventive detention: a repeated violation of human rights.
If the arrival to power of López Obrador in 2018 fueled great hopes, largely disappointed, that of Sheinbaum in 2024 only opens room for moderate optimism. If we can be sure of one thing, it is that, no matter how loyal she appears to be towards her mentor, she is not AMLO. Fortunately, she comes from a very different place: that of activism, science and ecology, three areas that López Obrador always seemed to disdain. Legitimized by the dimensions of her triumph, Sheinbaum has all the elements to become a good president, as long as she remains faithful not to who led her to the candidacy, but to her origins: the internationalist socialism of her parents and her career. like physics. In other words: let’s hope that her personal style of governing combines her social vocation with the critical and dialogic rigor of science.
But let’s not be fooled: Mexico—impossible not to repeat it—is a cemetery. We will talk as much as we want about economic growth, financial stability or a certain reduction in poverty – the conditions that have determined the victory of the 4T – but the figures of violent deaths and disappearances, of which only 0.4 percent are resolved, They confirm that there has been no progress in this matter: in Mexico, justice does not exist.
Claudia Sheinbaum’s challenge becomes greater, if possible, than that of López Obrador: if the disqualifications towards the forty percent of the population that do not agree with her project and do not develop policies as soon as possible that include the control of military power , the staunch defense of human rights (including the abolition of informal preventive detention), a new and more fruitful relationship with civil society, an ambitious cultural, scientific and environmental agenda and, above all, an urgent reform of the prison system. justice, which covers both the Judiciary and the prosecutor’s offices as well as the police and the laws themselves on the matter, his impressive victory will not prevent the country from falling apart in his hands.
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