Last Wednesday, in Reforma, the counselor of INE, Cyrus Murayama, argued why the famous Plan B The electoral reform of President López Obrador could cause the annulment of the 2024 elections and a “political crisis as serious as it is unnecessary.”
murayama explained what is at risk of prospering the Plan B. In his Millennium column, Hector Aguilar Camin made a recounting of the same subject throughout the past week, that is, the danger of changing the electoral rules when we already know that he INE It manages well the installation of the voting booths, the reception of the votes, their counting, the drawing up of the minutes and the subsequent transmission of the data.
I am not going to repeat what was said by murayama neither Aguilar Camin which can be read in Reforma y Milenio. What interests me is to understand why Lopez Obrador would like to cause a possible annulment of the elections by generating a political crisis. The question is not idle considering that, according to the polls, his party, Morena, is very high up in the presidential race.
Why risk succession if the stars are aligned to win in 2024?
A first hypothesis is that the President is not entirely convinced that Morena can succeed that easily. Ergo, it intends to tilt the field in favor of the pro-government candidates, which contemplates part of Plan B, for example in terms of advanced campaigns.
This explanation, however, would apply before the elections and not after. Here we are conjecturing why the President would be interested in annulling the ex post elections due to organizational problems of the INE as a result of Plan B.
Here comes a hypothesis that I have previously described. As of now, the President is preparing the narrative of possible electoral fraud if he wins the opposition in 2024. AMLO, as we know, has never accepted defeat at the polls. He’s not going to do it for the first time next year, much less having the power of the Presidency.
If on June 2, 2024 the opposition rings the bell, López Obrador will not know the result. He will argue that he had sent a constitutional reform to clean up the electoral system, but the opposition rejected it so that the “mafia of power” would steal the elections as in the past.
If Plan B prospers, as Murayama and Aguilar Camín argue, there will possibly be many irregularities. AMLO and the morenistas would indeed have evidence to claim fraud and would request the annulment of the elections. In this sense, Plan B would actually be a plan in case the opposition won.
On the other hand, if Morena wins the Presidency, the argument of fraud and the request for annulment would only apply in places where the official party lost. Let’s remember that, in addition to the presidential election, there will be gubernatorial elections in eight states, head of government in Mexico City, more than 1,500 mayors’ offices and 30 local congresses.
In the past, the lopezobradorismo has claimed fraud where they lose and has remained silent where they win in the same election. In 2006, for example, they tried to annul the presidential election for alleged fraud, but they accepted the results of federal legislators where they did very well, and the one for head of government in the capital, which they won.
This hypothesis sounds reasonable to me. However, there is another one that I am beginning to hear in many typical presidential succession rumors. The speculation is that, whether Morena wins or loses the presidential election, there will be so many irregularities as a result of Plan B that AMLO and his closest circle would request the annulment of the elections. This in order for López Obrador to stay in power longer as the only factor of governability for the country. Faced with the political crisis, better the prolongation of the popular leader in the Presidency.
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Personally, I reject this type of prophecy. It is stretching the league a lot of the imaginable. Here we would be facing a breach of the constitutional order. Our Magna Carta perfectly describes the mechanisms in case the President is absent on October 1, 2024. Congress would appoint an interim one and new elections would be called. AMLO could no longer be head of the Executive because re-election is explicitly prohibited in the Constitution.
Of course, it can always be argued that the nullity of the elections would lead to a political crisis so acute that it would no longer be the Constitution but the real factors of power that would decide who would remain in the Presidency. Here we would be talking about a kind of self-coup by AMLO with the acquiescence of the Armed Forces. And that, personally, I consider it very farfetched.
Twitter: @leozuckermann
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