Ricardo Pascoe Pierce
Things are not going well at the beginning of the decisive year for evaluating the 4T and AMLO as President. The crises in the government’s management are multiplying, and nervousness is taking over the National Palace. Despite having a generous budget approved by the docile Congress, money is not everything. In other words, all the money in the world does not ensure victory at the polls.
The signs of discontent are multiplying and are articulated in broad societal sectors. Despite the early inaugurations of mega-works, such as the Mayan Train and the Transisthmian Train, the various airports, the Dos Bocas refinery, and those yet to come, the social mood is not only not improving but tends to worsen.
All polls are overwhelming: the government flunked for its lousy management and not fulfilling its promises. Insecurity is worse than ever. AMLO presides over a country that has become a gigantic cemetery of victims of violence, pandemics, and the disappeared. Society lives in panic while the President, blind or lying, says nothing is happening.
Corruption in the government of the transformation is worse than ever. The presidential family is accused of building a system of favoritism, collecting bribes and kickbacks, selling contracts, and charging for services. This is hiding behind the National Security Law so as not to be accountable to anyone for how they spent trillions of pesos.
The health system has failed and is regressing in service and quality, while the mega-pharmacy is a useless bureaucratic apparatus, a rheumatic white elephant. There are not enough medicines in health centers for the country’s sick. Fifty million citizens do not have access to health services.
Public education, already deficient, suffered a brutal setback with the pandemic, and there is no governmental intention to recover the quality of education that young Mexicans require to face the world and its labor challenges. Public money no longer goes to education. There are not enough resources, say the authorities. Rather, the problem is different: there are other budgetary priorities, and education is not one of them.
Both the polls that give Sheinbaum 30 points above Xóchitl and those that show a difference of 6 points between them confirm that AMLO’s administration has failed. The social mood coincides with the polls: the government has failed. AMLO’s political, verbal, and budgetary aggressions seriously hurt many social sectors.
The relatives of the 43 who disappeared from Ayotzinapa have come to the painful conclusion that AMLO covers up for the Army and, therefore, lies to them. Just like Peña Nieto. It is a sector that numerically is not large, but its moral authority, a product of its pain, exceeds that of AMLO and all the Morenistas who follow him. Their words reverberate throughout Mexican society.
The same happens with the relatives of the disappeared, now offended by a government that belittles and despises them. There is no greater offense than the government’s attempt to fade the disappeared once again, with the re-victimization of their relatives. They are marginalized from the public budget. In addition, they are exposed to the direct aggressions of organized crime and lack federal protection. They live with pain at the surface.
Academics, researchers, and scientists are a broad community also despised and trampled by the policies and words of AMLO and his gunslingers in the academic world. The same has happened with the medical world, offending and attacking doctors, nurses and medical students. AMLO prefers to spend public money to favor Cuban doctors rather than to improve the conditions of Mexican professionals.
The entire journalistic world, both owners, journalists, reporters, commentators and columnists are systematically targeted by presidential offenses. He promotes the perception that journalism, by exercising freedom of press and expression, acts as a subversive body. The President treats the profession as an opposition party and seems to accept the aggressions of organized crime against it. He does nothing to prevent the aggression and murders of journalists in Mexico.
Farmers, peasants, and ranchers no longer believe in the empty promises of a government that has no empathy for their circumstances and does not even care. The Seeding Trees program serves only to create a dependency of the sector because the cash distribution is to be owed directly to AMLO.
Of course, anyone who considers themselves middle class will have heard and received the insults, aggressions, and offenses the President has uttered to them in his five and a half years in power. He even created a term designed to denigrate: fifí.
He is a President who enjoys offending citizens. He laughs at the misfortune of others and enjoys their mistakes or failures. He lacks any hint of empathy. Therefore, the slogans of “love for the people” and “love with love is repaid” could not be more false and reveal the cynicism that characterizes this government.
When Sheinbaum announces that her candidacy is based on her “love for the people”, it is impossible not to feel embarrassed by such falsehood.
All this political abandonment and hollow rhetoric exposes a social mood that seeks a future different from what is offered by the continuity of the Morenista verbiage.
The Massive Caller polls, which were the most accurate with their time series in the recent elections in Coahuila and the State of Mexico, paint the picture most similar to a tense social mood, the product of the repeated verbal and material aggressions of the group that today governs our country. The most recent poll on the difference between Sheinbaum and Xóchitl is 41.3% for the morenista and 35.1% for the opposition—6 6-point difference. With 23.6% undecided, the election is entirely fluid. This result corresponds to a society in a polarized situation and with a social mood prone to change, modify routes, and take a new course.
The latest Massive Caller survey for Mexico City indicates the same. The most recent survey shows an equally competitive race, congruent with a polarized city. For Brugada 41.9% and for Taboada 36.6. There is a five-point difference, with 18.3% undecided.
Both results are congruent with the current Mexican society: polarized and divided, where the electoral result will depend on the angry and undecided who do not accept their marginalization from public affairs and the fundamental decisions on the direction of the country and the use of the budget. Those who are undecided are undecided because they do not know who to believe in after the disappointment with AMLO’s administration.
AMLO knows about this adverse social mood and the reality of the polls. For this reason, he decided to go on the offensive, seeking to redefine the terms of the campaign debate and imposing on Sheinbaum a narrative of his own and a gag at the same time. He wants the campaign to revolve around his legislative proposals: judicial reform, pension reform, and National Guard. AMLO wants to be the candidate, given the lukewarmness and ineffectiveness of Sheinbaum’s figure and candidacy. He wants to be the central presence of the campaign, even if he is not on the ballot. He does it out of desperation before the reality of that scarce 6 % that separates Sheinbaum from Xóchitl after having spent a fortune to raise the figure of the weak Morenista candidate.
Those 6 points of difference keep AMLO awake every night trying to scrutinize the future and asking himself: how far can I go, how violent, to avoid defeat? His arrogance, which is a form of blindness, prevents him from seeing the simple truth: his time is running out.
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