In addition to proposing a “Who is who in lies?” daily, President López Obrador has suggested that he could hold Saturday and Sunday press conferences. The goal, he says, is to combat the “disinformation” that is generated on weekends and has to clear up Mondays.
“Here we respond to slander, lies, alarms, false news. And if they continue like this and it is not enough for us from Monday to Friday, there will be Saturday and Sunday mornings, but we are not going to leave them space for disinformation, for manipulation, ”he said in February 2020.
For Bernardino Esparza Martínez, an academic at La Salle University, the president has the right to respond to what he considers “slander” from the opposition, as long as he does so with strong elements and arguments.
“The president has the right as long as he has sufficient arguments to prove that what the opposition is saying against him is false, it is his way of governing,” he says.
AMLO calls march organizers “hypocrites” #YoDefiendoAlINE
In between, the race for 2024
President Andrés Manuel López Obrador’s decision to respond to the opposition, according to the political scientists consulted, is not because they concern him as adversaries because in four years of his government they have shown weakness in being a counterweight to his government, but because of what that is at stake in the presidential race.
Efrén Arellano explains that part of President López Obrador’s annoyance at the call to march in defense of the INE is the possibility that the opposition will come together and build a common candidacy.
“If he sees it as a way to build a candidacy or an alternative movement that he leads, that’s why the bother,” he says.
In the march, although it was not for the purpose of launching a candidacy, several of its conveners have been mentioned as a possibility for 2024, among them: Claudio X. González, Gustavo de Hoyos Walther, Alejandro Moreno, national leader of the PRI; academic Denise Dresser, among others.
