On December 1st, Andrés Manuel López Obrador will be in the middle of his government when he completes three years since he took office as president of Mexico. He is the most voted president in Mexico’s democratic era, with 53% of the vote. The last president who had won with an overwhelming percentage of the vote was Miguel de la Madrid in 1982, with more than 70%, but Mexico was still under the authoritarianism of the PRI (Institutional Revolutionary Party).
The Mexican political system changed after 1997. Since then, there has not been a unified government as achieved by López Obrador in 2018. Previous governments: Ernesto Zedillo (between 1997-2000), Vicente Fox (2000-2006), Felipe Calderón ( 2006-2012) and Enrique Peña (2012 and 2018) were divided and juxtaposed. The president’s party did not control the federal legislature nor did it have a significant majority of state governors.
In those years, Mexico lived a democratically intense era, with a party system of moderate pluralism with three relevant political forces, PRI, PAN (Partido de Ação Nacional) and PRD (Party of the Democratic Revolution). The president had to negotiate those with party leaders; and, on the other hand, the governors and municipal presidents organized themselves to counterbalance the centralizing presidentialism and strengthen federalism. To broaden the control of power horizontally, autonomous constitutional bodies headed by specialists in specific matters were created.
AN INEFFICIENT DEMOCRACY
But this democracy was not efficient in relation to the intensity of demands and historical delays. According to the 2017 National Survey on Government Quality and Impact, the most pressing problems for the Mexican population were insecurity, crime, poverty and inequality, just after corruption emerged.
López Obrador knew how to read the moment well, noted the discontent with the political class and focused his campaign on the fight against corruption as the main problem in the country. In the 2018 elections, the party system collapsed, the PRI came in third, and MORENA (National Regeneration Movement), the party he created only in 2012, won in virtually every state, in addition to obtaining an important majority in the legislative power. with your allies.
The opposition as a whole was left with little capacity to operate, which generated stampedes for the president’s party. Once in power, AMLO (Andrés Manuel López Obrador) created a narrative around the “Fourth Transformation” (4T), a slogan to identify his government which, together with a strategy of permanent polarization, succeeded in making a large part of the population believe that you are introducing a new regime. In the midterm elections of 2021, MORENA won eleven of the fifteen governorships in dispute, again a majority in the legislature – with its allies – and obtained significant majorities in the subnational legislatures.
LOPEZ OBRADOR AT HIS CROSSROAD
But legitimacy is lost or increased as a result of efficiency and effectiveness. And then the numbers don’t favor him. From 2018 to 2020, according to data from the National Policy Evaluation Council
Social, the number of poor people increased from 41.9% to 43.9%, the OECD (Organization for Economic Cooperation and Development) reported that the middle class rose from 53.5 million people in 2018 to 47.2 in 2020 And although the government has pointed out that they are consequences of Covid-19, it is also true that Mexico is one of the countries with the worst indicators in terms of pandemic management worldwide.
In terms of corruption, the government’s main flag, according to the World Justice Project, Mexico dropped fourteen places, ranking 121st out of 126 countries. Its social policy has focused on increasing resources in the form of scholarships, support, credits, among other instruments, but its design suffers from serious institutional and operational deficiencies, and it has become more than anything else an instrument of electoral patronage .
During his government, he formally militarized public security by creating the National Guard with elements of the Armed Forces, who were also in charge of various civilian tasks, such as the construction of a new airport, a refinery, a train line, the management of the newly built airport. created the Welfare Bank, the functioning of customs and immigration control, among others. This strategy is dangerous because it politicizes the armed forces and encourages management opacity.
In the rest of his government, López Obrador will face many challenges. He revived some practices of the Mexican presidential system that had disappeared, such as the cult of personality, decision-making centralism, pharaonic works, a social policy based on direct allocations and donations, among others. But the Mexican political system maintains very strict unwritten rules that no politically strong president has managed to change.
AMLO knows the system very well, but it has fallen into the same temptation as some of its predecessors. In Mexico, presidential reelection does not exist constitutionally and is politically unthinkable. In July 2021 López Obrador and his party introduced the figure of “repeal of mandate” into the constitution, and distorted the spirit of the letter to be seen as a “ratification of mandate”. This raised the idea of a possible attempt to modify its constitutional mandate.
Another reading has to do with your own political position within your movement. From the third year onwards, presidents in Mexico begin to lose power, and the actors around them begin to move strategically, thinking about their political future. That’s why López Obrador has surrounded himself with a cabinet that is on average over 65 and most are about to retire. Only its chancellor, Marcelo Ebrad, and the current Head of Government of Mexico City, Claudia Sheinbaum, who positioned themselves as natural successors. But he literally controls them.
Activating the “repeal of the mandate” translated as “ratification” could curb the ambitions of its collaborators with the idea: “I rule until the end”. However, López Obrador needs a strong party, but MORENA has very little institutionalization, it is a coalition of pragmatic political positions and a mixture of even contradictory ideologies, so it can hardly classify itself as a left-wing party, but it rises above because its cohesion is based on loyalty to the leader.
In the coming months, it is very likely that López Obrador will resort to broad mobilizations and deepen his polarization strategy to keep alive the project that led him to the presidency. But this, in turn, will be a sign that their power is fading, like that of all the strong presidents who ruled Mexico.
*Translation from Spanish by Maria Isabel Santos Lima
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