called to order
After the initial message, the panelists interrupted each other and even snatched the words. The moderator had to call them to order repeatedly, especially when asked why they thought the next three years could be better.
“I don’t think we could be better, we will be worse. We are in a totalitarian regime”, insisted Vidales; Atilano refuted him and described those assertions as “serious”, “You have to get out of your bubble”, he stated; Lozano turned to him: “The roll does not work, you have to see the data” and showed several graphs with downward figures in health, education, employment.
Solano questioned: “I thought I was coming to a serious debate!”, and called for “not playing with the people” and defended what AMLO said, in the sense that you can govern without debt, with social programs directly , “without ghosts or intermediaries”.
During the second part, the accusations and disqualifications rose in tone. Gilberto Lozano accused AMLO of “giving away borrowed money”, of showing off with “other people’s money” and complained that the messenger is attacked, “as is the style of the house… it is the school they have in those duckling schools”.
Juncal Solano refuted him: “In Mexico, femicides are going down and it ranks first in the recovery of vaccines and today the AMLO government can guarantee 250,000 vaccines because there is economic stability, it saves and it does not steal.”
Natalia Vitales questioned her: “Not because femicides dropped this little while, I’m going to boast that I’m addressing the problem. The reality is that the problem of women is not being addressed at all”.
In the end, they spent more than 60 minutes in a dance of figures, numbers and phrases, but they did not establish a clear position as to why citizens should or should not go to the polls and participate in this first exercise in direct democracy.
