Ricardo Pascoe Pierce
AMLO threatens to propose 36 constitutional changes next February 5 by avoiding attending the event to commemorate the Constitution. It is necessary to analyze the origin of the President’s bizarre and erratic behavior, barely eight months away from leaving office.
If, for him, these issues are so important as to merit changes to the Constitution, why did he not raise them since the beginning of his term five years ago? If they are crucial issues for the existence of the Republic, why didn’t he raise them three years ago when he proposed his modifications to the energy sector or the National Guard?
Furthermore, each day that passes before February 5, it is possible that the President will add more modifications to his list. Each mañanera is an opportunity to add a new wisecrack, such as the most recent addition: to prohibit the consumption of fentanyl or any other narcotic drug in the national territory.
In the six-year term of the President, who announced, in the beginning, that “it was forbidden to prohibit,” is when more prohibitions sprouted throughout his administration, starting with the ban to criticize the President under penalty of suffering various punishments. In the President’s words, he proposes to punish drug consumption with a criminalistic approach to the phenomenon of consumption instead of proposing a vision of it as a public health problem. The proposal is so retrograde that it comes as a surprise. What kind of prohibitionist left is that?
The initial question of why he did not raise this list of issues at the beginning of his administration remains without a satisfactory answer. Some have suggested that the President wants to lead the discussion during the electoral process. He wants the candidates to discuss even the minutiae of his proposals to prevent them from raising his administration’s obvious shortcomings and failures. With the extensive list of constitutional reforms, he seeks to create the image of much work and foresight in progress.
He wants to avoid discussing, for example, the insecurity crisis that is increasingly plaguing vast swaths of the national territory. He prefers that they discuss the insane idea of electing the Supreme Court Justices instead of analyzing the criminal and violent tragedy that the south, center, and north of the country are experiencing. Given the failure of his government in security matters, what better than to put on the table the exotic idea of electing Supreme Court Justices, peppering the debate with personal insults to each of the Justices who “are not mine”.
Even the proposal to re-debate in Congress just three months before the election, the issue of the assignment of the National Guard to the Army is a trick to disguise the explanation of the government’s failure in the fight against organized crime: “They did not allow me to do what was necessary”. The President will argue that militarizing the police would have allowed him to tackle the problem of organized crime with greater rigor. Of course, that argument is false, but it would have been used to evade his responsibility for the evident failure of his anti-narco “plan”. By the way, another argument is full of a “leftist” perspective.
He also wants to avoid discussing the US Government’s observations that he has been negligent in the fight against crime because it will help him to win the June elections, intimidating the opposition.
Others have suggested that the presidential idea of presenting a cascade of constitutional reforms is to make himself present in voters’ minds, seeking to make them think that they are voting for López Obrador and not for a famished candidacy called Sheinbaum. Or, in the worst scenario, the proposals for constitutional reforms will let his presidential candidate know, once and for all, that his proposals and the eventual government will have to be subject to what he dictates. That is to say, it is the preannouncement of the maximato (the real power behind the throne) that he intends to establish.
Finally, his being the leading proponent of issues for the campaign is, without any doubt, a supreme act of misogyny. Who, in his right mind, would conclude that a woman could govern Mexico alone without the guidance of a man? The President thinks.
The two central ideas offered as an explanation as to why he intends to propose a minimum of 36 reforms to the Constitution in February, barely three months before the election, are undoubtedly correct. The intention to guide the discussion away from his failures and those of his government and, also, to dictate the course to the poor female candidates, especially to humiliate Sheinbaum, are perceptions with full merit. This is how López Obrador operates.
But there is another element to add to the analytical mix, and it should cause horror. And it is the idea that, beyond attributing the President’s actions to his whimsical ideas, it reveals that he has no idea how to govern nor what he wants to achieve, outside of receiving applause for his person. He has never had a government plan except to use public funds and the power of the State to appease his need for power and exaltation.
That is why he never published a government plan at the beginning of his six-year term. And that is also why he never advanced his supposed “government agenda” when he could approve anything he wanted, having a qualified majority in Congress. In the first three years of his administration, he had all the power and did not know what to do with the majority. He did not do it because he did not know what to do.
“Half the harm that is done in this world is due to people who want to feel important. They don’t mean to do harm, but the harm does not interest them. Or they do not see it, or they justify it because they are absorbed in the endless struggle to think well of themselves.”
— T. S. Eliot, The Cocktail Party (1949).
The only thing he could think of when he had the qualified majority in Congress was to promote the revocation of the mandate, with the ideas stolen from Evo Morales and Hugo Chávez. Fortunately for the Republic, Mexico had elected a perfectly ignorant demagogue to the Presidency. When he lost the qualified majority in 2021, he barely woke up and tried to repair the blow received. And even then, he was unable to articulate a coherent national project.
But it was already too late. All of his constitutional reforms of 2022 and 2023 were rejected by Congress and the Supreme Court of Justice of the Nation as unconstitutional.
The same will happen now. He knows that his proposals for constitutional reforms will not prosper. They currently contain a strong dose of demagogy. But they are part of a desperate electoral strategy in the eventuality that his candidate loses the election before a more structured and defined national project than his.
The most important of all is that the President has demonstrated, at the end of his six-year term, that he does not have and has never had a national project. This reality can no longer be hidden, aside from some phrases said, not by him but by others, that simulate heroism and greatness and serve to disguise the smallness of the man who demanded to live in a palace to, at last, enjoy the relief of feeling bigger than he is.
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