The men call and the women explain. It is nine in the morning and a dozen Morena militants advance through the streets of Santa Lucía del Camino, a popular municipality on the outskirts of the capital of Oaxaca. They are loaded with leaflets with the smiling face of the president and a slogan: “Keep AMLO going.” They knock on all the doors, it doesn’t matter if they are homes, tortilla shops, grocery stores or carpentry. In one of the shops, between bags of dried chili and pork rinds, a woman interrupts one of the militants before she has time to explain herself. “My husband died six months ago and I am living with what the government gives me. I am going to vote for the president because he is the only one who is supporting us.”
María Amparo Cuevas is 78 years old and receives 7,000 pesos (about $350) every two months. Subsidies for older adults and young people are the argument most used by the brigades of Morena, the government party, to ask for a vote in favor of Andrés Manuel López Obrador in the consultation on the revocation of the president’s mandate that is being held this Sunday. in Mexico. Since the beginning of February, 300 of these militant brigades have been touring the 10 electoral districts of the Oaxacan state.
Participation is the great battle horse of all the political debates on this referendum, inside and outside the ruling party, while the result in favor of the continuity of the president is taken for granted and the 40% quorum that imposes also seems far away the law for the decision to be binding. The implementation of a referendum in the middle of the six-year term was born at the initiative of López Obrador himself, fulfilling one of his historic campaign promises. With the president’s popularity ratings almost intact since the landslide victory in 2018 and with no serious clouds on the horizon, Sunday’s consultation reads more like a political operation to continue propping up the president than an effective expression of discontent against him.
In fact, Morena has been the main promoter of both the appointment and the mobilization prior to the polls. The opposition, for its part, represented by the alliance between the PRI, the PAN and the PRD, has actively called for not participating, seeking to capitalize on results with low influx as a puncture of the Obradorista phenomenon. However, the campaign has developed unevenly in the political circles of Mexico City, where part of the dispute between the Fourth Transformation and its critics, and the rest of the country, has been taken over. Mexico, as in every electoral race, has shown signs of fervor on the part of the militants -including the habitual bringing of sympathizers to the acts-, but also of inertia or apathy in the face of a vote whose result is already written and which has more to do with the figure of López Obrador than with a real competition or a specific program.
Morena’s forecasts for Oaxaca are among the most optimistic. They expect a participation between 20% and 30%, above the average expected on a national scale. In the cabals they weigh that the Southwestern State is among the first in the popularity lists of the president. He also tells that the result in the August consultation to open a possible investigation of the former presidents, the first referendum carried out under the legislation, the participation here was also higher than the average, close to 8%.
Oaxaca is also one of the six states where gubernatorial elections are held on June 5 and where the polls give a comfortable victory to Morena, who would unseat the PRI in one of its traditional fiefdoms. The electoral campaign began last weekend and the militants of the Morenista brigades usually combine walks for the recall in the morning and putting up posters for the governor’s office in the afternoon. Many feel that they walk with the wind in their favor.
“I appreciate that you are a leftist and what you need you will get from our president.” This is how Habacuc Sumano almost always ends his speech with the residents of Santa Lucía del Camino after giving them the leaflet on duty. Sumano, 44 years old, is a greengrocer and a militant of the Mexican left since the time of the PRD. His trajectory illustrates the partisan changes in the state. Oaxaca is one of the poorest and most rural in the country. A granary of the peasant vote and the patronage logic of the traditional PRI. The strong presence of the indigenous population and the weight of the powerful teachers’ union, a PRI ally for decades, are other vectors that explain the Oaxacan political map.
The reign of the PRI already had a first period when in 2010 an alliance between PAN, PRD and Movimiento Ciudadano promoted Gabino Cué as governor. The disintegration of the alliance and the consequent dispersion of the opposition vote brought the PRI back to power. Today, the balance is tilting more and more towards Morena, which has absorbed the PRD base and also has the support of the National Coordinator of Education Workers (CNTE), the most radical wing of the union. Five Oaxacan teachers are now federal deputies for Morena.
Optimism is also breathed in a city like Tlaxcala, head of the homonymous state, about a hundred kilometers from the capital. Last Wednesday, while in Mexico City tens of thousands of people supported López Obrador in an act in front of the Monument to the Revolution together with part of the ruling party’s staff, Tlaxcalan sympathizers marched towards the local Zócalo to show their support for the President. Officials -several of them with a distinctive mark of their dependency- Morena militants, retirees and groups of young people packed the square before sunset. “The people are with AMLO because he is the only one who has been with the people.” The summary of Luis Pérez, 46 years old, gives the idea of the delivery of the militants. He has been following the president for years, like Rosa María Pérez and Guadalupe Alicia Fernández, a retired federal worker and nurse. Everyone is informed, they talk about the constitutional reform that mandated this consultation, about direct democracy and criticize the National Electoral Institute (INE), one of the targets of the chief executive.
Tlaxcala is a small state, with a census of around one million voters, but it has been governed by Morena since Lorena Cuéllar prevailed in the elections last June against the candidate of the opposition alliance and already in the August referendum she managed mobilize a higher percentage of voters than in the rest of Mexico, almost 12%. Despite the low specific weight that this data has in the federation as a whole, expectations are now higher than in other territories, since the goal is to double that mark, at least. Ultimately, it is also about competing for loyalty to the Fourth Transformation and to the president. That will be, to a large extent, one of the victories of the militants and of the senior positions of Morena this Sunday.
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