The contradictions, inconsistencies and lies of the presidential speech

Although it was somewhat predictable, the political reaction of President Andrés Manuel López Obrador to last Sunday’s march in defense of the INE is deeply worrying and certainly regrettable. It is a much more emotional than rational reaction that, sadly, does not reflect any intellectual willingness to adapt judgments, attitudes and, above all, strategies to what is today the reality of the country. To say that the march was made up practically exclusively of conservatives and “fifis” and that the total number of people mobilized between the vicinity of the Angel of Independence and the Monument to the Revolution did not even reach 60,000 not only implies maintaining an attitude of eyes closed before what is empirically evident, but also, and in a much more serious way, it clearly reflects the presence of a fanatical attitude so deep-rooted that it literally clouds the ability of those who suffer from it to appreciate and interpret reality objectively. López Obrador is evidently incapable of realizing that the country that witnessed last Sunday’s march is very different from the country that massively voted for him and his political movement in 2018. It is impossible to know precisely, but it is not difficult, given the magnitude , diversity and energy of the march, assuming that many of the people who were part of it voted four years ago for a process of deepening democracy that never came and, now we know, will never come as long as López Obrador and his party remain in power. can.

Far from taking advantage of the situation to build bridges of dialogue with those dissatisfied and critical sectors of the citizenry with a liberal and progressive ideological position, the presidential speech reinforced its exclusive and confrontational character. Once again, the intolerant caudillo declared that any criticism of his government and his state transformation program constitutes an act of profound disloyalty to Mexico, regardless of the meaning of the criticism and the ideological position of the person who formulates it. For López Obrador, characters as divergent as Claudio X. González, José Woldenberg, Vicente Fox and Roger Bartra are part of the same “oligarchic conspiracy.” All those who marched last Sunday are corrupt, reactionary, enemies of the people and irreducible supporters of the restoration of the Ancien Régime.

Like all the populist caudillos that the modern world has unfortunately had to endure, López Obrador conceives of politics and government in undemocratic or, to put it more emphatically, deeply authoritarian terms. For the President of the Republic, the only truth and the only way are those that he conceives and proposes. In his megalomaniacal delirium, López Obrador is convinced, as sinister figures such as Adolf Hitler and Hugo Chávez were in the past and, today, authentic madmen such as Vladimir Putin and Donald Trump, that the Volkgeist or “spirit of the people” expresses itself through it. The Tabasco native indeed harbors the fanatical belief that providence has chosen him to fulfill a historic mission, which is why he conceives of himself as an emulator of great figures such as Benito Juárez, Martin Luther King and “Mahatma” Gandhi. It is truly unfortunate that for the second time so far this century (Vicente Fox was the first) an opposition politician massively supported by the popular vote disappoints the citizenry in such a sad and painful way once he has installed himself in power. If we carefully analyze López Obrador’s presidential speech, we will realize that he is riddled with contradictions, inconsistencies, and lies.

In the first place, it is clearly contradictory that, on the one hand, he calls himself a democrat and that, on the other hand, he projects his deep contempt for the opinions of political actors who do not share his vision of things every morning, filling them with such inappropriate adjectives. as absurd, as well as the fact that he openly expresses his intention to make the legal and institutional changes that are necessary so that the right never returns to power. Is it that he does not understand that without effective possibilities of alternation there can be no democracy and that without a true democracy socialism is impossible? Where does the difference lie in political and ethical terms between this position and the one assumed by the right when it considered him a danger to Mexico in an attempt to justify any strategy, legal or illegal, leading to his arrest? How does this authoritarian and arrogant attitude differ from that assumed by Vicente Fox when he irresponsibly and idiotically claimed to have “loaded the dice” to prevent the popular vote from favoring the PRD left in the 2006 federal elections?

Secondly, it is profoundly incongruous to boast on a daily basis that both the economic development policy and the strategy to combat organized crime promoted by his government have been successful when the Gross Domestic Product has contracted by nearly 5 percent since 2018. percent (Indonesia’s economy is already larger than our country’s) and every day dozens of people are killed in Mexico, including journalists, local politicians and mothers looking for their missing children.

Finally, it is an outright lie to affirm that the pharaonic works undertaken by the federal government during the current six-year term have been a complete success, have cost little and have also been financed with savings generated as a result of the frontal fight against corruption. The truth of the matter is that the total cost of the Mayan train has increased 150% in relation to what was initially budgeted and that both this and the other “pride of the six-year” works have been financed with resources from multiple trusts that have been eliminated (including educational and research trusts for development) as well as the now diminished “Fund for the Stabilization of Budgetary Income” (FEIP), whose amount was close to 275 billion pesos at the end of 2018 and so far of the current six-year term has been reduced by more than 90%. Regarding the supposed success of these “strategic” projects, it should be noted that the Felipe Ángeles airport currently receives 30 daily flights, less than 5% of the more than 800 daily flights received by the AICM, which was supposed to “take pressure off ”, while the Dos Bocas refinery is repeatedly flooded and to date has not refined a single barrel of crude oil and the “Tehuantepec Interoceanic Corridor” is two years behind schedule and is far from shaping up as the monumental work of “magnitude international” that it was originally intended to be. Last but not least, it is also a big lie to maintain, at the height of cheap demagogy, that our country will have a universal health system from next year equivalent to that of Denmark, a European country whose national income per capita is six times higher than in Mexico and whose total taxation, as a percentage of GDP, is higher than 48% while in our country it is lower than 18%, a figure that places, in relative terms, the tax revenue of the federal government below the Latin American average.

Although it is true that the three preceding six-year administrations and especially the administration headed by Enrique Peña Nieto (without a doubt the most uneducated, incompetent and frivolous ruler that Mexico has had in the last fifty years) shattered the confidence of the sectors popular in government, it is also true that beyond his undeniable ability to connect emotionally with “the poor,” the current president has done very little to change the fundamental structures of the state so that those “poor” can one day effectively stop being A clear example of the above can be found in the case of the education sector. Unlike the social-democratic governments that govern and have governed in Europe, the supposedly popular and left-wing government of López Obrador has not only not increased but has significantly reduced public spending on education. Without education there can be no social permeability and without social permeability there can be no effective poverty reduction. The greatest historical failure of the political regime that emerged from the Mexican Revolution was the failure of the federal policy on public education, a failure that continued with the patrimonial, oligarchic and corrupt neoliberalism introduced by Salinas de Gortari and that, far from being corrected, was has deepened in the framework of the current government of López Obrador.

In short, Mexico is currently being governed by a stubborn and deeply resentful man who has not only been incapable of solving real problems, but has encouraged the expansion of an environment of growing polarization and confrontation between the different sectors and groups that make up civil society. . At this point and in view of the intransigent, closed and aggressive reaction that the citizen mobilization last Sunday provoked in López Obrador, it would be extremely naive to expect a change of discourse and strategy coming from the National Palace. The only thing that remains for those of us who are convinced that the economic, social and political development of Mexico necessarily implies the strengthening of the institutional framework that has made possible, since the year 2000, political alternation in the sphere of the federal executive power, is to maintain ourselves alert and, from our respective trenches, continue to exercise our critical capacity even when the flaming finger of the caudillo accuses us, from his morning pulpit, of being reactionaries and stateless.