Antonio Navalón
This situation is not similar to when people sing rancheras and ask for or give “the last one and let’s go”. That, as Gardel’s tango says, “life is a breath of air. That twenty years is nothing”. Indeed, we all know that life is temporary and that moments and situations do not last forever. Power is obtained and gained, but power…also ends. Every story, no matter how fantastic it may be – or pretend to be – has an epilogue and an end. And so, following the purest logic of cycles, the six-year term reaches its culmination.
At this moment, I would like nothing more than to know what went through President López Obrador’s mind during yesterday’s election day and his thoughts at the dawn of this new day. We know he is a man of faith, even in himself. We will never know if his faith is enough to survive and continue on his way without being the center of the world.
The pandemic taught me many things. In the period of confinement, I realized many terrible aspects of myself. I realized that the real reason I hadn’t made significant structural changes in my life was not because I couldn’t but because I hadn’t wanted to. The pandemic also taught me that, despite filling hundreds and hundreds of pages telling what I would do and what we would do with family, it turned out that family was another subject in which, for most of us, it was impossible to succeed.
The problem is us. It’s always us. But, believe it or not, here we are, and here we remain. Even though some had hope or despair at times that we would not get to this point, it has happened. All the speculations about whether the six-year term would end or not, or if it was possible that with his voice – not of thunder, but of the South of Mexico – every morning, he would be able to make his people tremble, dream, and suffer. All that and much more happened.
Today is the first day without López Obrador competing directly with the Sun. It is the first day in which, as it happens in dawns, that strange mixture and evolution of colors disappears until finally, the light and the Sun come out, and a new day begins. I do not know if we, the talkers, the commentators, the journalists, the politicians, will be able to live without the shadow so important, so decisive, and definitive of the one who always had other data.
The law dictates that President López Obrador has three months left in office and to return – if he wants – to take away our sleep or to give us sleep, depending on how you look at it. However, I want to extrapolate what his immediate future means. And if his immediate future becomes what he has said it would be, our future will also benefit or be harmed. The first person whose present and future will be conditioned is that of yesterday’s winner – depending on how you look at it -. Having survived such a long campaign -which began the night she won the governorship of the State of Mexico- gives Dr. Claudia Sheinbaum a character of resilience and persistence.
In a country where we like to talk so much and rhetoric – or the threat or lack of it – is a differentiating element, today, the one who has genuinely benefited is the one who knows how to take advantage of other people’s mistakes. I do not know how many successes the president-elect of Mexico may have had; I do know that her mistakes were counted and that she perfectly fulfilled the role and mission she had to perform, which was to ensure the continuation of the Fourth Transformation. López Obrador laid the first floor; now it is Dr. Sheinbaum’s turn to rise and consolidate the second. We will see how close the breath will be blowing in the back of her neck from the one to whom she owes everything up to this point.
For the first time in history, Mexico has elected a woman to lead the country for the next six years. I hope and pray that the eagle’s chair will not be misogynistic. I wish and hope that all those legends we have about Latino and Mexican males do not come true. As we say in our country, the boss is respected, and the boss is the boss. The new president-elect has the same conditions to rule us as any man had, wherever he came from and whoever he was.
There will be time for historians – which any of us can be – to draw up the balance sheet. I hope such accounts and analyses can be made with a smile on our faces and not with an explosion of fury about what the six-year term of López Obrador’s 4T meant. At this moment, while INE is putting the figures in order – and here, I do not want to overextend myself basically because at the time this has been written, not even the PREP has finished its work – what I consider necessary to do is to take a look at the panorama that arises after the battle.
It is time to think of the line Wellington said to Napoleon after the battle of Waterloo: “nothing but a battle won can be half as sad as a battle lost”. Defeating a man like Napoleon, who had changed the entire continent’s history, had been a milestone that only the Duke of Wellington could boast. There is only one thing superior to the sadness of defeat: the loneliness of victory.
I do not know if history will justify the importance that had the fact of being able to carry out 24 years of an endless electoral campaign and, above all, the verbiage, the dialectics, and the words, millions of words, launched as the only form of government in the mornings and for six years, day after day and failing only in cases of force majeure, President López Obrador made his morning appearances his best demonstration of exercising power. Except for Sundays – although there were some Sundays when he did make appearances – the leader of the Fourth Transformation dedicated himself to appearing on the screens of our televisions, cell phones, computers, or any other form in which he could be tuned in to give the account and panorama of the reality of the country, his reality. It did not matter if he was traveling -which were many in the interior of the country, but few outside our borders- he always found a way to be present and latent in our subconscious.
At the end of his mandate, how will the owner of the other data live and experience silence? What will he feel when he learns that his voice will soon cease to be the whip that moves our society and that he is no longer the only one competing with the Sun? Will he discover what it means to rebuild himself based on some books and look with sympathy at the work of his political children in following his legacy? Or, will he feel bad that they will not be able to honor the commitment they swore to him no matter how hard he has tried? It will be interesting to see how he, who is everything, the beginning and the end, the engine of the road, the train and the plane that brought them here, will live the new stage of the country and the people he will soon cease to lead.
Today begins the beginning of the end. Today, after his last night of absolute power, he is no longer the only truth. And in these hours that for one is the end and for the other is the beginning, it is inevitable for me to ask myself: what is going through their minds, and how are they living this sunset that, at the same time, is the beginning of a new history?
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