AMLO lost its charm in key elections

President Andrés Manuel López Obrador’s coalition retained control of Congress in Sunday’s elections, but lost the qualified majority in the Chamber of Deputies, According to preliminary results, which indicated that one of Latin America’s most popular leaders may face new limits in his power.

Analysts said the results were relatively positive for López Obrador’s nationalist and protest movement, given a number of political issues, including the devastating coronavirus pandemic, an economic collapse and a huge murder rate. And his Morena party could win more seats as parties engage in a haggling to strengthen their voting blocs.

“He won, but he did not triumph”, Daniel Zovatto, political analyst at the pro-democracy organization International IDEA, told Aristegui Noticias newscast.

Yet he noticed that AMLO, it will have to negotiate with other parties to approve its reforms. And while Morena was set to add at least seven governorships across the country to her previous six, seemed to face serious setbacks in influential Mexico City, which had been a key electoral base for the president.

The biggest prize in Sunday’s election was the 500 seats in the Chamber of Deputies, where López Obrador hoped to retain the qualified majority he had gathered after his landslide victory in 2018. Morena won between 190 and 203 places in Sunday’s election, according to projections by the National Electoral Institute. With a large number of small parties, he could control nearly 300 seats, less than the two-thirds needed to push through constitutional reforms.

Almost half of 32 governorates of the country and thousands of positions in local government. He was the biggest election in Mexico history, thanks to a reform that moved the vote for many positions to the same year.

More than half of eligible voters voted, an unusually high number for a midterm election, whether or not it occurs during a pandemic.

López Obrador’s opponents have called the vote one of the most important in recent Mexican history. They fear that he wants to orient this country, the first trading partner of the United States, towards the kind of authoritarian one-party system that prevailed for most of the 20th century. Critics compare Mexican leader to populists like Brazilian president Jair Bolsonaro and the Salvadoran chef Check it out who demonized opponents and rejected challenges to their authority by the judiciary.

López Obrador’s opinion on the elections was no less harsh. He describes his efforts to reduce poverty and corruption as a “transformation” that will end free market policies which has entrenched deep inequalities. “We don’t want to go back to this regime of corruption, injustice, privileges” for the rich, he said.

After the 2018 elections, Morena formed a coalition to control more than two-thirds of the votes in the Chamber of DeputiesHowever, the ruling party was unable to muster a similar qualified majority in the Senate, which makes it difficult to pass controversial constitutional reforms.

Senators are not running for re-election this year. Still, the votes could end up tangled political alliances. Opponents feared the president might garner enough support to push for an initiative to reverse free market reforms in the energy sector and weaken the autonomous institutions created to strengthen Mexican democracy.

“There must be checks and balances,” he said. Ines Candano, 26, a lawyer from the affluent Polanco neighborhood in Mexico City, who voted for an opposition coalition. “In any presidency, one person shouldn’t have that much power.”

Morena was created by López Obrador and is bolstered by its popularity, which has remained high despite the economic crisis and the deaths of over 300,000 people from the coronavirus. His approval ratings hover around 60 percent.

Alejandro Moreno, a pollster for El Financiero, says the support reflects Mexicans’ affection for the rural and outspoken leader, rather than for his politics. “When we look at performance indicators, for example, how the government is managing the economy or how the crime or corruption, he’s getting really bad numbers, ”he said.

Daniel Martínez, 35, who sold sandwiches in Iztapalapa, a low-income neighborhood in the capital, he said he supported Morena in part because he identified with the president. Lopez Obrador “It also comes from the ‘city'”, He said. “He cares about us.”

Martínez said his family received a payment from the government to buy food and school supplies. These social programs help explain why López Obrador continues to be a “Teflon chair”, said another pollster, Jorge Buendia. Yes many Mexicans don’t blame him for the coronavirus crisis because it was a worldwide phenomenon.

There is another important factor, says Federico Estévez, a political scientist at the Autonomous Technological Institute of Mexico. “It was a incredibly incompetent government“, He said. “But the opposition is even more incompetent.”

The traditional parties of Mexico have been discredited through corruption and its inability to generate solid economic growth or reduce violence linked to organized crime.

However, voters in Mexico they seemed to punish Morena for the impressive number of deaths due to covid-19 in the capital, epicenter of the epidemic, and a accident in the metro in which 27 people died last month. Most of the town halls, which had been dominated by Morena, leaned towards opposition coalitions, according to partial election results.

In the middle of your six-year term, the president did not prove he was the radical leftist that some of his adversaries feared. López Obrador significantly reduced bureaucracy, he expanded the role of the military and pushed for a stronger government presence in the energy sector. Supported free trade and championed a balanced budget.

Yet even some of his supporters were worried for their willingness to challenge democratic norms and rules. In April, López Obrador’s party voted extend the term of four years of the chief justice, an ally of the president, a decision that legal experts have openly called unconstitutional.

López Obrador has pledged to respect the ban on presidential re-election imposed by Mexico. But Luis Rubio, president of the thinking group Mexico assesses, told Uno TV that the action has generated enormous uncertainty. “Once the institutional framework was broken, we entered a very different era.

(c) 2021, The Washington Post

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