The Monreal factor begins to have weight in the presidential succession process that began months ago and was officially detonated with the march on Sunday. The march and the presidential message had an undeniable end-of-six-year tone, with Claudia Sheinbaum, Marcelo Ebrard and Adán Augusto López awaiting a presidential decision that, in all this process so advanced, will be given, they say, within six months , as soon as the elections for the state of Mexico and Coahuila conclude.
What was seen on Sunday indicates, once again, that the presidential sympathy and thus it is seen, is with the head of government, but as always on this path full of simulations, deceptions and depth bombs, there is very little left but at the same time They are always politically very long months, especially in a 2023 that is guessed as polarized as it is convulsed.
Given this scenario, Monreal is playing his cards prudently but with a long-term strategy. He did not go to the march, he knew that he would be attacked there, at least verbally, by the toughest of Morena (there is the spit that Ebrard received in the middle of the march), and he preferred to go to Madrid to the Mexico-Spain interparliamentary . There he met with opposition leaders and there they reached an agreement to start a joint tour with the president of the Chamber of Deputies, Santiago Creel, promoting the agenda that Monreal himself presented a week earlier, at the Arena México event. where in fact he launched his candidacy, raising a program based on reconciliation.
It is a smart bet and one that the opposition should take on quickly. Of course, in the opposition there are also rude who prefer to go directly to the confrontation. Yesterday he listened to Senator Germán Martínez saying that it makes no sense to talk about reconciliation before a president who hardens and polarizes. He is wrong with the faith of the converts: in the face of polarization, few discourses are more effective than reconciliation. President López Obrador polarizes and will continue to do so because he knows that in this logic his opportunities are greater, he has always done it, sometimes it works for him and on other occasions it doesn’t. But the entire presidential discourse is built around it: liberals and conservatives, chairos and fifís, loyalists and traitors, and all the long list of adjectives with the president daily praising his own and disqualifying those he considers his adversaries (who in that speech are always enemies).
The country demands reconciliation because without it, neither the social fabric, nor the economy, nor the political fabric can be reconstructed, neither security, nor growth, nor the educational and health system can be recovered. I don’t think there is a more positive discourse for the opposition, led by Monreal or any other, than to demand reconciliation, than to propose a country project that can heal wounds, close the gaps that have been opened by the government itself.
It is no coincidence that the most important opposition expression in these years has been the defense of the INE (actually of an electoral system that, with successes and errors, has proven to be equitable and has allowed alternation), perhaps the institution that best represents in all this process of democratic transition that the country lived through for three decades, the spirit of conciliation. If it was possible to move from the perfect dictatorship, Vargas Llosa would say, to a true democratic system, it has been thanks to the conciliation of all the political forces. López Obrador himself, and there is an example of his inauguration speech on December 1, 2018, so different from that of this Sunday, he won the presidential elections with such breadth because he left aside in that campaign the radical edges that were removed from him. win in 2006.
That is why Monreal’s strategy is correct, because it must also be remembered that he continues, until Morena decides otherwise, within the official sphere, that there is a group of senators who wants to remove him from the leadership of the Senate, but continues to maintain the support of the majority of the pro-government and opposition senators. Just last week, in a letter, 152 federal deputies (50 from Morena) gave him their support in the face of the attacks by Layda Sansores, he has spaces of power in Mexico City, obviously in Zacatecas, and is heard in different spheres of power. Is that enough for you to be a Morena candidate? No, but yes to be able to build a lot from other spaces, even in Morena, even though the ruling party has opted for polarization.
It is evident that Morena is not willing to open spaces for Monreal, much less her long-standing aspiration to be a candidate for Mexico City (snatched in 2018 in favor of Claudia Sheinbaum, one of her main opponents from then until today). But it also seems clear that with the reconciliation speech Monreal is waiting for the decision to be made by Morena, while bringing together supporters in the opposition.
Many things can happen, but in the short term everything indicates that in this confrontation between polarization and conciliation a good part of the succession political dispute of the immediate future can be established.
By the way, the march on Sunday was so impressive, as was the disorganization and lack of security for President López Obrador himself. It is not a minor issue.
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