It was no longer just about collecting the bill for the fact that the PRI did not support the energy reform proposed by the ruling party. It was also about exposing their vulnerabilities and taking advantage of them politically. Said in good Mexican vernacular, what Morena did was “take a crack” at the fact that the leader of the PRI “has a tail to be stepped on.”
It is worth pausing a little to ponder what that means. A coalition that never stops pretending to be morally superior chose not to bring to justice a political leader who allegedly committed multiple crimes (ie, illicit enrichment, money laundering, diversion of funds, influence peddling and tax fraud). Rather, he offered him impunity in exchange for the votes of his party in Congress.
There will be those who say this is politics and perhaps they are right. But we will have to ask them, then, in what sense a government that does politics in the same way as the governments of the past represents a transformation. How can they maintain that they are “not equal” when they do the same thing, that is, when they are so willing to compromise with what they supposedly condemned, and even grant it immunity, in exchange for political support?
Except for the leaders of the PAN and the PRD, I cannot locate anyone who has been called by surprise because of what the national president of the PRI ended up doing. I do locate many, however, who in good conscience should be surprised by what López Obrador is trying to do with its new PRI allies in order to consolidate the militarization process that they repudiated yesterday: give up the possibility of giving it a civilian command to the National Guard and extend the public security tasks of the armed forces. Wow, neither Felipe Calderón nor Enrique Peña Nieto dared to do so much. Why López Obrador yes?
The alliance between the PAN, the PRI and the PRD suffered from the problem of being very similar to the caricature that López Obrador painted of it. By becoming a pole whose only hallmark was antilopezobradorismo, it projected exactly the image that the president wanted: in the end they are the same, they have not understood what happened in 2018, they only represent the past, etc. The rupture of said alliance may have its electoral costs in several contests, but it may bring an unexpected benefit, namely, freeing the PAN and the PRD from the dead weight that, in terms of reputation, the PRI implied.
