Ricardo Pascoe Pierce
The poll results conclusively show that the country does not know what to think about the future. As usually happens with every new six-year term, whoever occupies the presidency always starts with favorable numbers. Typically, a sort of optimism invades the national mood. Everyone wants us to do well as individuals, as families, and as a country.
It expresses a state of euphoria and joy on the part of some or resignation but wishing the best on the part of others. And a great mass in the middle that feels neither euphoria nor resignation but simply the desire for everything to go well and for the controversies and political clashes to end.
The President’s high approval numbers are consistent with what has happened with previous presidents since satisfaction surveys have been conducted. There would be no reason to expect any other result. It started the same way with Calderon, despite Lopez Obrador questioning his numbers. With very high approval numbers, the same thing happened with Salinas despite the questioning of his election. Many doubt the president’s strong results, but the country has no anti-fraud movement. Conformism is not a sign of lack of doubt or irritation but a sign of a certain resignation.
But what happens with the presidential approval polls of the current president is what occurred with AMLO. Although he had a high approval rating, even up to the end of his term, the same did not happen with his government’s public policies. While 55% approved of his administration, 55% disapproved of his handling of public security or the economy, and he consistently flunked on the issues of public health and public education.
On the other hand, there needs to be more time to judge the President’s public policies. For the time being, we have her high approval rating. But the polls show that the challenges she faces are the same as those of the past administration: insecurity, a faltering economy, lack of medicines, and massive school dropouts among millions of former students. These concerns clearly describe the failure of AMLO’s past administration.
Society’s eyes are on whether she is really capable of successfully addressing these four issues, even though it is understood that they are not the only ones. Electricity supply, PEMEX debt, federal government deficit and indebtedness, green policy, relations with Spain, the United States, and Canada, the wars in the Middle East and Ukraine, and the CUSMA/USMCA/T-MEC are first-order issues that will be observed by those who deal with these issues or who are directly affected by their policies and implications.
The President’s ability to resolve, or not, will begin to be seen in the upcoming polls. Those polls will be observed very carefully. First, what will happen to a president who has not shown herself to be a charismatic political subject or necessarily empathetic with political actors? The roughness with which she treats the members of her cabinet and other minor court actors has already been commented on. What will suffer in the polls is her popularity, as these rough behaviors may not be known in detail, but they are perceived.
Another aspect that may affect her popularity is how she is perceived as subordinate to the former President. It is one thing to emanate from the same party and quite another to be subordinated to his orders and indications. The standard of her independence will be even crueler because she is a woman.
Mexico lived more than 70 years with the PRI, and with each six-year term and President change, the need for the new President to “kill” the previous one was imposed. Each President was seen as different, even contrary to the previous one. This fact allowed each new president to refresh the national political environment with new faces in government and other policies. This six-year change allowed for the evolution of different policies and approaches.
The former President imposed a chastity belt on the President. He appointed more than half of the new cabinet, forcing a dual loyalty that is a harbinger of future conflicts: loyalty to the former and supposedly to the incumbent President. Congress is led by loyalists to both and, perhaps, with more loyalty to the former President than to the current President. In Morena’s internal struggles in Congress, the President’s operatives have been isolated, ineffective, and subordinated to the interests of the former President’s operatives, who apparently are the majority.
The recent expressions of the President that she was not aware of certain proposals made by legislators reveal that things in Congress are going elsewhere and not through the President’s office. There is even an assumption that the proposal by Congressman Manuel Espino suggesting the convenience of creating a bicameral commission to negotiate with drug traffickers has its origin in the former President’s office. It was a message to find out the feasibility that such an instrument could serve to counterbalance and eventually annul the President’s security policy.
Within the pure and hard Morenismo, they see García Harfush’s security proposal as too close to Calderón’s security policies. To tackle the criticisms, the President warned it was not about returning to “Calderon’s war.” But that did not remove the former President’s doubts and suspicions about García Harfush’s presence in the security cabinet. For that reason, he decided to have a former PAN member from Calderon’s time offer a peace proposal to drug trafficking.
Obviously, a conceptual gap is opening between the policy of dialogue with drug trafficking (meaning a political agreement) and Garcia Harfush’s confrontational policy with intelligence. At the same time, that gap is a conceptual and political discrepancy between the former President and the President.
Where will things stop within the power dome? It is not clear where these confrontational processes will end. It is too early to know. But it is evident that the armies are getting ready for combat within Morena. And it is obvious that the former President wields real and effective power within the cabinet and in Congress.
This situation foreshadows an attempt at a maximato, but it is very different from what Elías Calles operated at the time. He had enough political power to remove and appoint presidents. AMLO does not enjoy that privilege. This former President can manage elements of the cabinet, the public administration, and Congress to sabotage the President’s public policies with which he disagrees, as we are witnessing in the case of public security.
These are the first skirmishes of a government that will face not the opposition but itself to define its intention and to write its destiny.
[email protected]
@rpascoep
Further Reading: