The United States has just gone to the polls in key elections for the future of its democracy. The latest electoral battle has involved the renewal of the House of Representatives, a third of the Senate and the Government of 36 States, in a vote against the backdrop of the war in Ukraine, the highest inflation in decades, the polarization and the reappearance of Donald Trump as an apostle of the extreme right. The world has focused on the new US political map and Mexico has not been the exception. The first known results indicate that the Government of Andrés Manuel López Obrador will face greater scrutiny in the bilateral relationship and in the conduct of its internal policy; greater pressures on immigration, trade and energy policy, and new challenges in the already complicated relationship with the US Legislature, according to academics, analysts and diplomats consulted by EL PAÍS.
“The most important thing is that there was not this red wave that was expected and feared,” says Martha Bárcena, ambassador to Washington from December 2018 to February of last year. The specialists consulted unanimously agree that this is good news. Less than 48 hours before the elections, Democrats and Republicans are still fighting vote by vote for control of both Houses and in some cases these battles will last for months. In any case, Bárcena points out, the onslaught of the Trump candidates in these midterm elections “is going to mean challenges for the Joe Biden Administration and the Government of Mexico.”
The bulk of the analyzes outline that the Biden government will lose control of Congress, a calculated defeat, although it seems to resist the conservative attack in the Senate. “The general perception, especially among the business sector and political elites, is that Mexico is doing better with the Republicans, although it seems like a mistake to me,” says Arturo Sarukhán, Mexican ambassador to the United States between the end of 2006 and early 2013, during the administrations of George W. Bush and Barack Obama. “Without a doubt, what is best for Mexico is for the Democratic Party to remain in the White House and in control of both legislative chambers, especially because of this tilt towards the extreme right that we are seeing in the Republican Party,” he adds. Sarukhan.
“It doesn’t mean that big problems are going to break out, but we have to be prepared,” warns Bárcena, who dealt with the final stretch of the Trump presidency and the renegotiation of the TMEC. A new Republican leadership in the House of Representatives also implies a change of hands in the control of parliamentary committees and subcommittees, with powers to decide budgets on cooperation, border control and security, among many other areas, Sarukhán points out. “We must not forget that the Mexican president has questioned Democratic and Republican legislators alike by name and surname,” says the former ambassador.
The diplomat clarifies that Biden has forced to “put a handbrake” on the questions of the still valid Democratic majority so as not to compromise Mexico’s collaboration on priority matters of the bilateral relationship and that dam may vanish with the new composition of the Capitol. “Since the murder of DEA agent Enrique kiki Camarena, I don’t remember a more dysfunctional moment in the relationship between a head of the Mexican Executive and the US Congress than the one there is now,” says Sarukhán.
In three visits to US soil, López Obrador has not had official meetings with congressmen, senators and parliamentary leaders of either party. Bárcena agrees that the Mexican authorities have to build more bridges with the US Congress, but does not agree with Sarukhán’s diagnosis. “In the two years that I was an ambassador, I spent half of my time in meetings with the Congress and the Senate,” she says.
The pressures will come from predominantly conservative profiles. “President López Obrador’s security strategy increasingly threatens the national security of the United States,” declared, for example, Republican Michael McCaul, one of the most advanced to chair the Foreign Affairs Committee, last June. Kevin McCarthy, who is on track to be the majority leader if it is confirmed that the Republicans will dominate the lower house, said that his priority in the new legislature that starts in January will be to impose stricter control on the border and revive the Stay program. in Mexico.
The arrival of representatives of States with large energy companies, whether from renewable or fossil sources, will also add pressure to the Latin American country, just when the US and Canada have called Mexico for consultations on its energy policy. Several layers of complexity can also be added to the equation: from drug trafficking and the revision of the labor reform in light of the TMEC to López Obrador’s relationship with the press and Mexican policy towards Nicaragua, Cuba and Venezuela.
Analyst Carlos Bravo Regidor points out that the most conservative candidates have continued to exploit a “toxic and highly demonized” image of Mexico to obtain electoral gains. “The idea of Mexico, regardless of what the relationship really is, has become a big electoral piñata, especially for Republicans,” he says. “Senators like Ted Cruz don’t really care about López Obrador or Mexico, but they use it as a weapon to try to attack Biden and that’s going to continue to happen.” In the campaign, some candidates supported by Trump have once again appealed to the wall and xenophobia, even threatening to “invade” to confront organized crime or close legal avenues for immigration regularization. More than 3.5 million voters of Mexican origin were called to vote, no other ethnic minority is larger, according to the Pew Research Center.
“The Mexican issue is fundamentally defined by the issue of migration, that is not going to change, in fact there has been continuity in the tensions between the two countries,” says Bravo Regidor. “It is an issue that favors the Republicans and that the Democrats have already written off because they are very likely to be portrayed as hypocrites or to pay a very high electoral cost,” he adds.
Bravo Regidor insists that the impact of the midterm elections cannot be measured only in terms of “what affects Mexico or not” and that the internal politics of the United States maintains a specific weight on the international scene. It is a point of view shared by Rafael Fernández de Castro, an academic at the University of California. Beyond the arrival of a Republican party with more radicalized and interventionist profiles at the hands of Trump, the distribution of political control represents, in his opinion, an enormous governance challenge for Biden. “There is likely to be a major government gridlock in Washington and that is disastrous for Biden’s agenda,” he asserts.
The obstacles that the Executive will face, says Fernández de Castro, can also paint a complex economic picture. The attitudes of various new faces in US policy towards trade, the role of the state in the economy and actions to remedy inflation may have an impact on the global financial climate, comments the academic. Strictly politically, American democracy seems to have survived a Trumpism that has already “metastasized,” says Bravo Regidor.
“Trump was the big loser and bad news for Trump translates into a correction of the extremes in democracy in the United States,” adds Fernández de Castro, who cites the failure of the red tide and the relaunch of figures such as Ron DeSantis, the governor of Florida, as evidence of the failure of the former president. In the gubernatorial elections the balance is even, but if the Democratic victory in Arizona is confirmed, the border corridor would only have Greg Abbott as the only Republican representative.
“López Obrador got on well with Trump because they have similar characters, despite the fact that they have very different political positions,” says Bárcena. “Trump liked López Obrador very much,” she adds. Regarding Biden, the diplomat says that he is “an old sea dog”, who understands that “the relationship with Mexico is important and that he must maintain it.” The former ambassador recommends doing an in-depth analysis to understand how the new legislators vote, how to approach them and who can be allies. “If you can’t create a constructive agenda, you should work to avoid bigger problems,” she says.
Despite everything, the consensus is that it is still early to measure the full impact of what is to come. “US policy has many irons in the fire,” says Bravo Regidor. With more than 3,000 kilometers of border, says Bárcena, the United States and Mexico “we are a marriage that cannot be divorced, due to geography.” “We are condemned to understand each other,” concludes the diplomat.
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