Federico Reyes Heroles
The liar, if he fails to convince you, tries to confuse you. Anonymous
“…In February, I will be the first”, he said with the modern humbleness that characterizes him. We see the country as orange; the only thing that matters to us is the citizens. No shady alliances; we are the hope, the new politics; purity characterizes us. Goodbye to the “old politics”. Let’s bury it. The light of freshness is coming. I am the new, the young. There is no more lie. The clarity of the farce dazzles.
Months with the “hopeful” speech of Movimiento Ciudadano (MC). But the reality is stubborn and evident. MC -with very little national strength- has a region where it really has weight: Jalisco. MC is breaking up; there is the shake-up with Alfaro or the announcement that in Mexico City (CDMX), they will support Taboada. MC is playing the scab of the Frente Amplio. The puppet was called Samuel García.
The tangle of lies reached laughable limits: to be a candidate but controlling Nuevo León. The Supreme Court of Justice of the Nation (SCJN) and the local Congress were missing. Institutions? The country to our measure. Sheinbaum condemns the “imposition” of an interim governor who is alien to MC and gives as an example her case, her resignation to the mayor’s office, to the government of the CDMX, occasions when people close to her were appointed to replace her. We are a clique. She forgets, conveniently forgets, that in both situations her party was in the majority. But in Nuevo León, it is not like that. PRI and PAN represent the majority. Sheinbaum defends the scab above the law. To take votes away from Xóchitl Gálvez, her real contender, that is what he was going for. His fall does not suit her. On her side, the real second place and rising, Gálvez, was very clear: “There is a Supreme Court of Justice that made the decision, and the decisions of the Court are enforced”.
Installed in total arrogance, they speak of guaranteeing “the project”, the one embodied by López Obrador. Modernity? It is called continuism, caudillismo. She was passing by the Palace; she had to deliver some documents and went to see him to see how his ankle was doing. And, of course, neither the Palace’s guest nor she realized that the visit could attract attention or that, at that hour, the press would cover the visit. Let them see that I am in charge and that you are coming to the Palace. What used to be safe conduct is now a ballast; it does not allow her to grow. It is politics. In the PRI and PAN past, successions implied an agreed rupture. López Portillo, after several intrusions, sent Echeverría to Fiji. De la Madrid, from the first minute, took his distance and began the painful surgery. When he left, he shut up. Salinas had to be more radical than De la Madrid, and he did it. Colosio did not take long to establish a break with Salinas. The rupture between Zedillo and Salinas was thunderous and costly. Zedillo kept a “healthy distance” from his party. Zedillo impeccably handed over power to Fox. Fox won the PAN by campaigning three years earlier. Calderón was not Fox’s candidate, the “disobedient son” was also imposed on him. Vázquez Mota was not Calderón’s candidate; it was a he. They lost. Peña Nieto, now without any possible hand-picking (dedazo), managed to convince the governors and the leadership of his party. He handed over power before the end of his term.
AMLO’s desire for explicit control goes far beyond dedazo. He has shown that he is capable of ridiculing Sheinbaum in order to maintain real command. Paradoxically, what is truly new in Mexico is a coalition of forced consensus. That is why suddenly, a cheating longing cries out for acts of demonstration of the vertical line as if we were in the era of the hegemonic party. It will not be so because Galvez needs the parties, and the parties need her. It will not be so because in the party caucuses, what is examined is who has more strength and the possibility of winning. That is why it was agreed that in the CDMX, the PAN would hold the upper hand, and thus, entity by entity, district by district. But they will go together in 266 districts. We have never seen that before.
They have run out of lies, and now they want to confuse us. But they go naked.
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