President Andrés Manuel López Obrador has replicated what Ernesto Zedillo said in his public reappearance in Mexico. “Representative of the oligarchy,” he has called him after his participation in the economic forum of the company Actinver where the former president attacked populist governments. “They like democracy until it gives them the opportunity to access power, and once they access it they set their goal of eroding it. It is a very serious problem, because the way to access democracy is through deception, demagoguery, populism,” Zedillo launched on Wednesday night before an audience that responded with applause during his multiple indirect allusions to the president of Mexico. .
The lack of response to the series of questions that he posed to the former president last Tuesday regarding the PRI's imminent return to Mexico has been minimized by the president who assured that “he had no reason to answer.” However, he took up much of his morning conference this Thursday to address the issue. “Zedillo has the right to express himself and defend what he thinks, nothing more than we think differently. For him, neoliberalism is a viable model, for me, not. For us it is neo-Porfirism, protecting the minorities, who continue to support it, recognize it. Surely they were the ones who invited him, how could they not support him if he gave them the assets of the nation, rescued them in a crisis. He is a representative of the oligarchy,” said the president.
The reflections of the former Mexican president on social support and the susceptibility of people to be attracted by the promise of a paradise without efforts “that they are offered that manna will fall from heaven and that they do not have to undertake great sacrifices or great efforts to achieve what we collectively aspire to,” have also provoked López Obrador's response. “What we have according to him and many others: it is populism, it is paternalism, because that is what they call what is given to the poor and what is given to those at the top, they call it development or rescue,” López responded. Obrador.
The economist's call to defend democracy due to the risks that threaten it was also responded to by the president. “When he was president, I maintain that there was no democracy. Because democracy is the Government of the people and for the people and he did not govern for the people, he governed for those above. That, according to the Aristotelian definition, is called oligarchy, with a façade of democracy,” López Obrador added. He took the opportunity to remember the Savings Protection Bank Fund (Fobaproa) created during the Government of Carlos Salinas de Gortari (1988-1994), but implemented during Zedillo's six-year term that converted the private debt of commercial banks into public debt. “A democratic government would not have done what it did, converting the private debt of a few into public debt. Who thinks and acts like that? An oligarch, not a democrat,” the president stressed.
However, in this same sense López Obrador defended the differences between the two. “It is legitimate that we have these differences, that does have to do with democracy, the fact that there is no single thought and it is not to cling to punches They are different ideas, but he has every right to express himself like we do,” he said. Incidentally, he has announced that his next book, scheduled for publication in February, contains lines of opinion about the former president. During his keynote speech together with the former president of the Government of Spain, José María Aznar, Zedillo avoided making direct references about the Tabasco native and his government until the last moment. However, in a clear allusion he pointed out: “Every time a politician who doesn't understand some things wants to insult someone, he calls them neoliberal.”
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