Luis Rubio
All the world’s governments initiate their mandate with significant political and physical investments and resources to lay the foundation of their project: narrative, legislation, and budget. Once the bases are established, these instruments are deployed in bills, developments, constructions, and a plethora of political activity, all oriented towards shaping their vision in practice. Nonetheless, this exceedingly natural logic has not been that of the new Mexican government. Four months of changes -actually massive destruction- of the (already in itself) weak scaffolding relied on by Mexico to promote economic growth begin to clash with reality.
With a new year upon us, the government must start delivering results. Still, these will not materialize because the whole plan was ideological and political, more than the product of evaluating the factual circumstances in which the country finds itself. Instead of the paradise that the outgoing president thought he was bequeathing, the point of departure for today’s President, the reality is quite different, and the plans that have been materializing, primarily through the legislature, do nothing other than limit the potential of the government’s success.
To be clear, the López-Obrador project was one of power and not of development. The narrative of well-being had been concealing the true objective, while cash transfers sealed the pact with its beneficiaries. All this was possible thanks to the work of previous administrations erecting the scaffolding that conferred exchange-rate stability on the economy and the contingency funds for unpredictable situations, all structured over an export economy and one integrated into that of the U.S. That is, as the colloquial saying goes, no one knows who they work for: the great beneficiary of his much-reviled neoliberalism ended up being none other than López Obrador.
The problem for President Sheinbaum is triple: first, the constitutional changes thrust upon her by her predecessor during the last month of his government radically alter the legal and political milieu. Second, the macroeconomic scenario evidences an acute deterioration; and third, the U.S. economy, on which everything depends, confronts political challenges in matters of enormous transcendence for Mexico, especially in migration and trade, which revamp the environment to the extreme. That is, what was valid in 2018 is no longer so in 2025. However, the present government has not yet detected the change in context.
The context in 2018 could not have been more propitious for the government of López Obrador. On the one hand, he encountered an economic structure that, although certainly not ideal, produced favorable economic results, manifested in the form of massive investments in energy and entire regions growing at Asian rates. Certainly not all of the population was benefiting directly, but the country, after three decades of convulsion, had finally achieved sustainable macroeconomic stability. On the other hand, in political terms, the unpopularity of his predecessor (Peña-Nieto) had paved the way for him to alight as the virtual savior, even to the extent that he took the liberty to cancel the building of the new Mexico City airport without incurring, apparently, particularly substantial reverberations.
The polarizing, disqualifying, and aggressive discourse emboldened a resentful and upset population, all of which discouraged private investment. Still, it was in turn not immediately perceived given both due to the significant improvement in the population’s real income (the product of remittances, direct cash transfers and the minimum wage), as much as the accelerated growth of the U.S. economy from the end of the pandemic. All these elements coalesced to bring about an exceptional end of the administration, that manifested itself concretely in last year’s election.
Now Mexico is facing the undertow: a very high fiscal deficit, a mushrooming debt, and two political legacies that mark both an end and a beginning: first, the overrepresentation of the governing party in Congress -the steal that made it possible to control all the national processes- and then the constitutional reforms of September and October. The party currently in the government has demonstrated that it can impose its law and has done this with generosity. What it cannot impose are the results that the President requires to be successful.
And that is the issue taking effect from this beginning of the year: the coup that her predecessor had heralded hither and yon was, in the end, led by AMLO himself: on refashioning the vectors of Mexican politics, above all of the Supreme Court, the factor that (together with the North American Free Trade Agreement) conferred certainty on the political as well as on the economic life during the past three decades, the party of the government came out extremely powerful, but it dismantled the pathway to the future rather than right it, without building anything useful in exchange.
For three months, the President has dedicated herself to promising countless novel spending programs while, the Treasury chests were empty. But what is a promise? A dictionary defines it as “an express assurance on which expectation is to be based.” The population will wait for results and, sooner or later, will demand accountability from the recently inaugurated government. Governments and their parties tend to think that they are eternal. None achieves this, and the present one will be no different.
@lrubiof
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