Ricardo Pascoe Pierce
It is already quite clear that the 2024 presidential election will not be a clean or fair contest. The problems of analyzing the harassment that Xóchitl Gálvez is facing in her presidential campaign start from here, in addition to the bulldozing that will come later.
The federal government’s strategy is to win psychologically the election from now on, creating the myth of Claudia’s invincibility. And, like all myth creation, it is done by modifying “appearances”. The PRI did the same at the time when it was hegemonic. The difference between the PRI and Morena is that the former had the advantage of decades of showing its invincibility, while Morena is just “creating” a myth of its own.
But Morena, with former PRI member Andrés Manuel López Obrador as its leader, knows what he wants. And it uses, at this moment, four main axes to advance its objective.
The first axis to convince about the invincibility of Claudia and Morena is the reinforced and combusted presence of the President of the Republic in events, inaugurations, controversies, attacks, and programmatic positionings. The mañanera is the President’s preferred platform to campaign for his party. He speaks alone, with no replicators, with national coverage, and can say what he wants. That is where the confrontation with the Supreme Court of Justice of the Nation comes from, the attacks on the Justices and the proposals of Morena militants to occupy seats in the Court, when the proposal is notoriously inadequate and provocative. The mañanera also includes the glorification of militarism, the humanization of drug trafficking, the demonization of autonomous bodies, and the hatred towards universities and the independent press.
But what is relevant about the presidential war against the independence of the Court is that it has become the axis of Claudia’s presidential campaign. The president dictates lectures, and Claudia repeats the mañanera’s sayings obediently. The president is confident that Claudia’s mimicry of him is the recipe for transferring his popularity to an otherwise rather anemic candidacy.
The second axis to convince about the invincibility of the candidate is the constant realization of massive popular events bought with public funds. The lack of genuine enthusiasm at her events is not what counts. What matters is the photograph of the events with auditoriums or baseball stadiums full of undefined faces. Still, in contrast with Xochitl’s more modest events, they are full of genuine enthusiasm. The story the National Palace promotes is always about quantity, not quality.
Claudia’s languid voice offers more 4T, but without enthusing the public, “no stealing, no betrayal, no lying” repeatedly. The candidate’s chatter intends to get the public to think about AMLO, not her. It reveals a tragic abdication of her relevance as a politician and as a person. She offers peace in Michoacán, a few kilometers away from another massacre of citizens at the hands of the irregular armies that roam that state and, incidentally, the whole country. But, yes, in front of thousands of Michoacans gathered in the heat of a small payday. The photo is essential to grow the myth, not the reality.
The third facet of the attempt to win the presidential election from now on is the purchase of polls whose function is to prove an “insurmountable” difference between Claudia and Xochitl. Perhaps the greatest tragedy of our political culture as a country lies in this issue. The tragedy of the pollsters who surrender their respectability in exchange for access to unlimited funds to convince, through “collective gaslighting,” that an alternate reality exists. They want to prove the impossible: that Claudia has tied in popularity with the president. That only exists in the unpunished fantasies of those who charge exorbitant fees to ensure the future of their businesses.
It is a deliberate collective “gaslighting” paid for and promoted by the government to make a significant portion of the country doubt their decision to support Xóchitl and think they have the wrong information. The “institutional gaslighting” is intended to make the people doubt themselves. It is an exercise in mass psychology to control the masses.
Finally, “gaslighting” gets analysts with good or bad intentions to look for and identify problems and fissures within Xochitl’s campaign. It is not the same working in front of three parties and an organized civil society, where each actor has interests, pressures, and needs, as operating the intimidating and coercive centralism of AMLO and Morena.
The institutional “gaslighting” serves so that the Morena campaign is not measured with the same yardstick. Those who know the inner workings of Morena and, mainly, Claudia’s campaign know perfectly well the deep fissures, contradictions, and tensions that exist there. AMLO, Claudia, Marcelo, Monreal, Delgado, Brugada: each pole of interest conflicts with or contradicts the others. Why is Harfuch mentioned for the Senate and not for the CDMX Prosecutor’s Office, for example? Because of hatred and confrontations between the sides that pretend or assume that they will govern the city in the future and distrust him.
The comparative analysis of Claudia’s and Xóchitl’s campaigns would reveal very different moods in the country’s regions. Mexico is deeply divided between the candidates’ options and has no defined consensus. For that reason, the polls announcing a closer race between the two campaigns, even with Claudia ahead, are more in line with what is really happening in the country.
AMLO is convinced that the more significant the polarization, the greater his electoral advantage, which suits Claudia. Trump thinks the same, as does Milei in Argentina. And yes, it worked for them at first. But Morena has lost the middle classes all over the country precisely because of that. Those same middle classes that voted for him in 2018, thinking he would bring solutions to the country, not confrontation and polarization, do not plan to vote for Morena.
The presidential strategy of having the “third” candidacy attracting the middle classes through Movimiento Ciudadano and Samuel García has failed miserably. The purpose was to subtract middle-class votes from Xóchitl to favor Claudia and Morena. This strategy reveals AMLO’s fear of the voting bloc against Morena from the middle classes, as it questions Claudia’s victory in 2024. The vote of the beneficiaries of social programs is volatile and insecure. The strategy with MC came, of course, after a secret agreement between Dante Delgado and López Obrador, including mutual complicities and betrayals to the proclaimed “public policy” of acting without lies, betrayals, and theft.
Now that the “third party” policy with MC failed, and to consolidate their electoral base, AMLO and Morena will have to resort to greater polarization, fear, and grievance between social classes, proclaiming a sort of class struggle. But, for this strategy to be as successful as it should be, Morena requires a rupturist, polarizing, Milei-like presidential candidacy. Contrary to that purpose, Claudia, as a candidate, has tried to be conciliatory. However, she neither excites nor warms up the square nor summons new supporters. The fact that she has accepted to be Andrés Manuel’s passive clone, repeating his proposals without originality and with her own voice, will lead her to electoral failure.
Hence, there is the urgency of being able to justify her “victory” in advance. That is the purpose of the false mantle of invincibility placed on her shoulders, together with the fake baton of command, until the lie is exposed, as it happened with the naked king.
For that reason, all the efforts to receive the mantle of presidential popularity, the mobilizations with public money, the purchase of polls, and the impact of gaslighting on analysts and people alike are indispensable ingredients to reach the goal proposed by AMLO.
All this happens because they know, in the high spheres of the government, that, with all her problems, Xochitl’s shadow and presence grow daily as an unstoppable threat. They fear that the wise people will know how to understand and distinguish between the government’s manipulation and Xochitl’s authenticity.
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