Juan Villoro
After six years in power, López Obrador can be seen as a magnificent proselytizer and a failed statesman. He founded a party that, in a few years, won the majority of the country, won the presidency with a record number of votes, maintained his popularity, dominated the public discourse, and managed to make his candidate and his party sweep the 2024 elections. He even had the luxury of influencing the opposition and contributed to Xóchitl Gálvez not running for Mexico City, where she had a chance of winning, but for the Presidency, where an inevitable defeat awaited her.
These tactical triumphs contrast with the ambivalent results of his administration. Trained in the PRI, López Obrador later assumed a leftist stance with which he tried to win in 2006. He came to power twelve years later, transformed into a populist caudillo who promoted neoliberal projects such as the Mayan Train, benefited super-millionaires, increased the militarization of the country without reducing violence, reduced support for culture, science, education, and health, and turned his back on feminist, Indigenous and environmental causes. From the presidential pulpit, he insulted journalists in the most dangerous country in which to practice journalism.
This discretionary use of power was accompanied by an economy that doubled employment and deployed effective welfare programs. The peso remained stable, and for the first time in two decades, the United States bought more goods from Mexico than from China. AMLO weathered Trump’s harassment and recovered margins of sovereignty by canceling the Merida Initiative and limiting the DEA’s interference in the country’s internal affairs.
A fanatic of honesty, he did not prevent his family and friends from participating in influence peddling from which they derive positions and profits. The confusion between public and private, which the PRI took to astounding levels, and the PAN tried to imitate, has not been alien to Morena.
With his rhetoric of “us against them”, López Obrador exacerbated the polarization that Fox had started with his impeachment process. Transformed into a victim, AMLO became an executioner. His justified criticism of inequality turned into a righteous harangue that turned every opponent into a “conservative”. An enemy of objectivity, he relied on “other data,” never revealed. Like Pedro Paramo, he was an unappealable patriarch, owner of a “living rancor”. He embraced millions but did not listen to them and distrusted experts.
All this was attractive to many. The President simplified the discourse and determined the public conversation. Torrential “mañaneras” haunted his opponents. Most of the private media opposed his government; however, to criticize him, they talked about him incessantly. In many forums, the immense variety of topics that a newspaper or newscast can offer was reduced to mechanical criticism of any official initiative, replacing information with propaganda resources.
Published opinion had little influence on voters. One of the lessons of the elections was how little effect the media had on the people’s will. Another lesson is how journalism ignores the silent (or, rather, silenced) majority. In essence, the media is not a mirror of society but of itself. Like the mirrors that Valle-Inclán saw in Madrid’s Callejón del Gato, they do not reflect reality but its distortion.
It is Claudia Sheinbaum’s turn, backed by more than 35 million votes, with long experience as a militant (always in left-wing spaces) and as a public manager. With intelligence, she coined a slogan to define herself: “Continuity with her own seal”.
She could not come to power by opposing a President with high approval ratings, who also holds the reins of Morena and has strong ties with the Army.
Politics is, among other things, the art of swallowing toads (and pretending they are tasty). Sheinbaum accepted the menu offered by the president. Although she has a solid scientific background in environmental issues, she did not oppose the fossil energies promoted by the President. In a country of femicides, her feminist agenda has not been very clear either.
What is certain is that she could not win without a promise of continuity. But her fate and legacy will depend on the other part of her proposal: her own seal.
This piece was published in Spanish by Reforma on June 7, 2024
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