President Andrés Manuel López Obrador has not liked recent statements by the Secretary of the Interior, Adán Augusto López, and has let him know. One was his statement that when he thinks of blood, Jalisco comes to mind, which prompted a harsh response from Governor Enrique Alfaro. The other was when he said that in the south they were smarter than the northerners. He reproached him for saying that a military man could be a presidential candidate, and finally asked him to retract his statement that former President Felipe Calderón was being investigated at the International Court in The Hague for crimes against humanity. The secretary took note, but in the one related to Calderón, he paid no attention.
Although all these moments could be interpreted as setbacks, to think that López bis is plummeting in the president’s confidence could be a mistake. The Secretary of the Interior, whom he has probably known for longer than anyone in his inner circle -including his children-, has become one of the very few operators in the López Obrador environment in whom he still has confidence.
He asked him to defend the Army from the attacks received by the hacking of its emails and to lobby the approval in the local congresses for the absorption of the National Guard, which he did by script, which paved the way for a new assignment. López Obrador decided – although he has not yet set a date for the announcement – to appoint him “plenipotentiary coordinator of the Morena parliamentary groups in the Senate, the Chamber of Deputies and local congresses”, a position that has various interpretations.
The first is that it limits the powers of the president of Morena, Mario Delgado, who limits him to electoral issues, which is not minor, although the great voter is López Obrador himself, who dictates to the party leader who goes where. in positions of popular election, and only leaves in their hands what is not considered strategic. It also excludes it from the agenda that it is interested in promoting in the legislature at the national level. That is to say, the priorities of the president will be handled by López bis, not by Delgado, turning the Secretary of the Interior into an alternate leader of Morena.
The second interpretation is the meaning that López bis is the one who leads the political relationship with the Morena benches in all the chambers of the country, in particular what happens at the federal level. The direct intervention of the Secretary of the Interior is an antidote to the control that Morena’s coordinator in the Senate, Ricardo Monreal, has, who in this way, without pushing him to the exit door of the party and having a politician with a trade and injured in the opposition keeps him inside, but with greatly reduced power.
In the case of the Chamber of Deputies, it is a direct blow to the president of Congress, Ignacio Mier, who has been losing the respect and trust of López Obrador in recent months. Mier made a mistake a few weeks ago when he asked for an appointment with the president, who thought he wanted to talk about the legislative agenda. To the president’s surprise, Mier offered to lobby and move forward with the opposition to the constitutional reform so that the Armed Forces extend their permanence in the streets for public security tasks until 2028, and asked for his support for the party’s candidacy for the government. of Puebla, where his adversary, Governor Miguel Barbosa, has a hand in the candidate proposal. The way he phrased it was taken as blackmail.
The next extension of tasks and responsibilities for López bis, the third interpretation, will send the message to Morena that control over the cameras is going to be vertical, so that they forget the horizontality and the maneuvering spaces that they seek for private ends, and that the Banks at the federal and state levels will be managed from the National Palace, by López Obrador, through the Secretary of the Interior.
This new reality leads to a fourth interpretation, which arises from a question: what is the president thinking about the future of the Secretary of the Interior? López bis is one of the three candidates appointed by López Obrador for Morena’s presidential candidacy in 2024, and until now he is seen as a distant third place and more as a piece of distraction and reduction of blows against the favorite, Claudia Sheinbaum, the head of government of Mexico City, who as a serious contender.
The accumulation of tasks and trust that the president delegates and extends to the Secretary of the Interior should generate uncertainty between Sheinbaum and the Secretary of Foreign Affairs, Marcelo Ebrard, who is waiting for a lucky break so that Sheinbaum’s almost certain candidacy suffers a disaster and he can enter as Plan B of López Obrador.
But if López bis has the new assignment on the presidential agenda and the political management of López Obrador’s priorities, who becomes almost mechanically the person who can best lead a new government without change, deepening the project that the president calls “ transformation”. Sheinbaum is at the personal and ideological heart of the president, but in recent weeks – which coincide with the way in which he has deepened his role as a carbon copy of López Obrador – he has received calls for attention for his clumsiness. The last one was last week, when he described the Formula One Grand Prix as a “fifi” event, which on the instructions of the president, given the complaints received, ordered him to retract—which he did.
Sheinbaum remains the president’s favourite, but she has been noticing her faults and mistakes for some time, and has not stopped pointing them out. The strengthening of López bis is not a good sign for her or for Ebrard. In Sheinbaum’s case, the secretary makes up ground and may become indispensable; in Ebrard’s, the alternative plan that she considers is, it can become Plan C or nothing at all. The secretary, no doubt, regained strength.
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