The first key that the package of first members of the next presidential cabinet has shown could seem very obvious but it would mean the first indication of a change in government style: the reactivation of the first floor of the federal public administration, giving signals, until now, that the Government of the unitary presidency with a cabinet of flowerpots would be ending.
President López Obrador’s personal style of governing has centralized the functioning of the entire central public administration in his person, his daily speech and his morning press conferences, based on a presidency in communicative action mode, with the appointment of pompous Secretaries of State, but with functions proper to department heads, sometimes not even undersecretaries or general directors.
Virtual President-elect Sheinbaum has used the piecemeal presentation of her presidential cabinet to highlight the professional quality of those appointed, which would be saying that the morning press conference model could be maintained for reasons of temporary continuity, but with secretaries of the presidential office with active functions to conduct daily affairs, giving administrative and therefore political functionality to the offices in charge of the different functions of the Government.
The secretaries of the presidential office were an inheritance from colonial Mexico, especially from the Bourbon period of the 18th and 19th centuries, when the administrative and political modernization of the monarchy began to require professionals in sensitive areas such as government management, finance, international relations and especially war matters. The first cabinet of the first elected president of the Republic, Guadalupe Victoria, consisted of only four ministerial offices, including the characterization of ministries insofar as they had management capacity and above all the condition for accountability: foreign and domestic relations, justice and ecclesiastical affairs, treasury and war.
Presidential cabinets fulfill two specific functions:
First, the development of specialized affairs of the presidential office and its division will be handled by the president in office who wants to give it that role.
And second, to become the space par excellence of the political organization of the ruling group exclusively for the purpose of producing the next official presidential candidate. Of all the Mexican presidents, only Vicente Fox and Enrique Peña Nieto came from state governments, taking into account that the Head of Government of the capital of the Republic has always had cabinet functions, which gave López Obrador and Sheinbaum as capital governors a certain level of members of the real cabinet.
President López Obrador completely erased the existence of the cabinet and centralized everything in the presidential office at the National Palace, not only appointing practically all the officials of each Secretariat of the presidential office, but ostentatiously erased the press, public relations or social communication offices to prevent those in charge of cabinet departments from using their position for personal promotion.
President Sheinbaum’s cabinet has two operational scenarios: first, to announce a real work team with functions in each of the areas, apparently returning to what was also erased in the six-year term that is ending: the presidential agreements to discuss specific issues of each area in meetings of the President of the Republic with the heads of the cabinet areas.
And second, to send the message to the different social and business sectors that have to do with specific areas of each Cabinet Secretariat, which would give greater functionality to the flow of daily activities of each department and would relieve the President of the Republic of having to attend to and resolve minor daily matters. The bottleneck of the National Palace led to the public activities of the Government that ended up in a centralization that prevented better daily functionality.
As is often the case at the beginning of each six-year term, the unveiled cabinet of President Sheinbaum is the starting point and transition from one group to another new one, which implies the perception of natural, imposed and even obligatory continuities, but every president at the end of his first year has the right to the first reorganization of his work team based on his own public and, above all, political needs.
So the game of musical chairs and power has just begun.
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