Ricardo Pascoe Pierce
When he had a qualified majority in the Senate and the Chamber of Deputies, AMLO proposed electoral and legislative measures without a long-term vision of the State as a nation. Unlike the Mexican case, the new presidents of Brazil, Chile, and Colombia made substantive proposals in their first months in office.
For example, the three South American presidents proposed both form and substance fiscal reforms. With their budgetary proposals, they sought to create the conditions to balance their social and economic development programs with maintaining essential state services, such as medical services, civil protection, education, scientific research, emergency services, etc. In other words, their reforms aimed to secure sufficient funds to advance their programs without dismantling the operation of State services.
In addition, the particular conditions in each of these countries have required the new presidents to promote legislative measures in the area of security. In the case of Chile, this was due to the growth of drug trafficking violence. Due to the attempted coup d’état in Brazil, President Lula is pushing to reform the country’s security forces. And in Colombia, Petro is seeking a legal framework for canceling criminal charges against the country’s armed groups in an effort to bring about peace.
Unlike his South American counterparts, AMLO began governing with a government program whose sole purpose was to win re-election. He wanted to replicate what presidents Hugo Chávez, Daniel Ortega, Evo Morales, and Rafael Correa had done: he promoted a constitutional reform to carry out a recall vote, which was intended to be the gateway to show that “the people” want and demand that the incumbent ruler remains in office indefinitely. From the first day in office, the only interest was to create the political and social conditions for re-election. He assumed that governing was a simple task, “without science”, as he used to say, and that he focused on his political pretensions.
The landslide election victory of 2018 and his unbridled desire for re-election blinded him. He thought that, as a government, he didn’t have to do more than hand out money to social programs and start his mega-projects (trains, refinery, airport). He was sure this would be enough for a successful outcome in the 2021 mid-term election. From that moment on, he calculated, his political strength would be consolidated so that he could reform the Constitution to allow his re-election.
In the 2021 election, the opposition won 2 million more votes than the Morena coalition. AMLO lost the qualified majority in Congress, eliminating any possibility of passing his constitutional reforms. All his “substantive” proposals were defeated in Congress. The recall vote was a disaster for AMLO and Morena. It did not even remotely reach the threshold of votes that would allow him to legitimize a constitutional change to allow his re-election.
He never contemplated the possibility of an electoral reversal. Today he continues with the same logic, with the same blindness, demanding an avalanche of votes in 2024 to make the fundamental reforms he did not propose and did not understand that he needed in 2019. He missed his historic opportunity. Today he fantasizes about receiving votes in 2024 that the movement no longer has or will receive.
If he had thought with a vision of State, he would have sought his fundamental constitutional changes (National Electoral Institute, energy sector, National Guard, Supreme Court of Justice of the Nation) in his first three years in office when he had a qualified majority in Congress, as his colleagues in South America did.
Fortunately for Mexico, he did not do so because he was not a statesman but a man blinded by his ambition for power. A tiny president for such a big country.
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