Sheinbaum’s ‘healthy distance’
Claudia Sheinbaum’s proposal can be understood as the so-called ‘‘healthy distance’ between party and government, proposed by the PRI member Ernesto Zedillo. In his presidential campaign in 1994, Zedillo proposed setting limits between the presidential figure and his political party, since until then the President of the Republic was “the first PRI member in the country.”
The then presidential candidate proposed becoming “a passive member of the PRI with the unwavering commitment to not to intervene at all in their internal life.”
(Photo: Galo Cañas Rodríguez/Cuartoscuro.)
Jacques Costehistorian and political consultant, believes that Sheinbaum’s announcement has two purposes: one discursive and the other substantive. In the first, the intention is to send the message that she will govern for all Mexicans, while the second, and more relevant, is to put a distance for herself. form their own power networks.
“It is an attempt by the president-elect to create her own power networks, her own power structure, independent of López Obrador, and the more room for autonomy she has, the better for her. So it is in her interest that Morena continues to be very important for electoral mobilization, for generating social support, but that it is not a space through which López Obrador or other political actors can exert their influence on the government,” he points out.
Remember that at the time, Ernesto Zedillo distanced himself from the party to avoid any intervention by the then former president Carlos Salinas de Gortari.
“Zedillo did not want Salinas to use the PRI as a vehicle to capture his government and I believe that Claudia Sheinbaum also wants to do the same, that the party responds to her, not to López Obrador or any other political actor and in that sense it is in her interest to mark a certain line of distance, at least discursively, between the government and the party,” he says.
According to the text “The `healthy distance’ between the PRI and the government”, According to Rosa María Mirón Lince and Karla Valverde Viesca of UNAM, the dilemma of not having a distance between the president in office and the party lies in the fact that in the exercise of power, the incumbent must govern for everyone and put the general interest before those of his party.
“The president, as head of state, represents the entire nation; therefore, he must govern for everyone and not only for the faction that brought him to power; he must avoid playing the role of articulator or cohesiver of groups, tendencies or individuals; but it is also true that he is inevitably the representative of a partisan political option, since he owes his position in the government to it,” he states.
Although in the speech, Sheinbaum asked for a “safe distance”, in fact, she will remain the most important Morena member.
“She cannot afford to give up being the political leader of Morena because there is a lot at stake, including her own political projects, her public works projects, her budget projects,”
Aldo Muñoz Armenta, professor at UAEMex.
