So much power accumulated Andres Manuel Lopez Obrador during his Presidencyso that three and a half weeks from the end of his term I’m using it for destroy what has been achieved. It does not seem like the act of an intelligent man, but of someone deaf and blind who, faced with daily calls for attention and warnings about the potential consequences of his constitutional reforms, responds frivolously and disqualifies them with his unwavering argument that everything is due to the fact that the powerful want to maintain the corruption and their privileges.
The Warnings They appear every day, as they have for almost two months, accelerated by the reform of the judiciary which has become his touchstone, and which is an electoral strategy in February framed in the so-called Plan C – convinced that it would never happen – became a reality after the results of the June 2 election. That’s where what he now denies began.
Since his victory in the presidential elections that gave him the qualified majority in Congress and placed it millimeters from reaching it in the Senatebegan his hurried race towards the cliff, thinking of its historical significance –his legacyas he says- without taking into account that Mexico is not an island and that its actions would have international consequences. The first, because it was immediate, was the depreciation of the peso: on Friday, May 31, two days before the election, the exchange rate closed at 16.69 pesos per dollar; after the approval in the Chamber of Deputies of the judicial reformthe peso reached 19.95 units per dollar yesterday.
What is happening in Mexico has been a source of interest abroad because it is a member of the North American trade agreement – the most powerful economic market in the world – and the main commercial partner of the United States. The judicial reform together with the disappearance of the autonomous bodies, whose initiative is in the legislative kitchen, puts the agreements with the United States and Canada at risk, but also impacts the trade agreement with the European Union, not only because of potential trade violations, but also because of undermining the democratic clauses.
López Obrador and his pupil, the president-elect Claudia Sheinbaumhave rejected these claims. On the contrary, according to Sheinbaum, there will be greater legal certainty and democracy. Who knows if she believes it, but she is already in the realm where what she thinks is less important than what she does. Sheinbaum is ideologically and politically convinced of López Obrador’s project, but unlike him – perhaps because she does not have his strength – she had been pragmatic in various meetings with businessmen and investors before and after the election, where she assured them that things would be different once she became President.
She probably didn’t lie to them, but they must be seeing that she is completely limited by the president.
López Obrador is taking advantage of his remaining time in the National Palace to install a shadow government, but with the teeth that the so-called shadow cabinet lacks in some industrialized countries, where the opposition establishes a mirror group of the government’s actions to monitor it, as he unsuccessfully tried to do in 2006, after his defeat in the presidential elections, with the so-called “legitimate cabinet.”
Her specific weight during the six-year term continues to extend far beyond the legal cabinet. On Sunday, when the Secretary of the Interior, Luisa María Alcalde, delivered the sixth government report to Congress, she used the microphone for eight minutes to give a speech of support for López Obrador, which was totally out of place. But Alcalde, who the president decided would be the next leader of Morena, was not speaking as the leader of the party that will accompany the next president, but of the current one, showing him that he had not made a mistake in choosing her and that she could be the continuation of his legacy in 2030.
Ricardo Monreal, who was appointed by López Obrador as coordinator of the Morena caucus in Congress during the first three years of Sheinbaum’s government, did the same on Tuesday when defending judicial reform. He did not make a parliamentary speech, but spoke as if he were at a rally, and like Alcalde with López Obrador as the main recipient, he sought to tell him that he had not been wrong with him either, whom he redeemed after a talk at the National Palace almost a year and a half ago, where he entered rebellious and came out tamed.
With the willingness of Morena’s allies, the Labor Party and the Greens, Monreal and Adán Augusto López, appointed by López Obrador as coordinator of the Senate bench, will hold the presidencies of the Political Coordination Boards of their respective chambers for three and six years, the length of their mandates, which is a highly significant decision. The boards politically control the chambers, decide the agenda, the times, the issues, the distribution of commissions and, above all, the budget. The position is for one year, but by extending it, its power is expanded and reduces Sheinbaum’s ability to maneuver to do parliamentary politics, because the coordinators do not answer to her, but to López Obrador, and the issues they will prioritize – using the money in their coffers – will be his, not hers.
López Obrador is not treating Sheinbaum as his successor, but as the administrator of the incoming governmentThe actions that have been undertaken to tie her down make it difficult for Sheinbaum to act pragmatically, as she offered to investors, to deactivate the bombs that the president is setting off, which cause ungovernability, threaten the North American trade agreement – the engine of the economy – and the arrival of capital for development and to fulfill the commitments that López Obrador has made.
It is a capricious paradox that lives. If the nightmare predicted in the world due to constitutional reforms materializes, the López Obrador’s legacy will have been cut short and he himself will have buried him. Sheinbaum, who is not his enemy but his best ally, may, in the extreme case that the self-fulfilling prophecy begins to be fulfilled, have to sacrifice Andrés Manuel to save Obradorism from destruction.
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