López Obrador admits that plan B is very limited

Nestor Jimenez and Emir Olivares

Newspaper La Jornada
Wednesday, December 7, 2022, p. 5

Hours before he sent to San Lázaro the initiative to reform secondary electoral laws, known as plan BPresident Andrés Manuel López Obrador acknowledged that the proposal it is very limited.

Consulted in his conference on Tuesday, the president stressed that since it is not a constitutional reform there are very few margins to propose changes.

He recognized that without the qualified vote in the Chamber of Deputies he would not be able to pass his constitutional reform proposal, but It does not mean that the flag has to be lowered, other times will come, when there is a majority.

He described the reactions of opponents of the reform as a collective tease and called not to be fooled.

“Time will pass and those who put up their sign ‘The INE is not touched’ will realize it. And it is unfortunate, because there are people who, even if it seems incredible, are in favor of paying 200, 300 thousand pesos to the directors; but there are others who do not know, that this is what they want to avoid”, the president maintained.

He argued that the majority of the population would support the reform if they knew its objective, Because there’s no way they don’t want elections to cost less and they want Mexico to continue being the country that spends the most on organizing elections. They don’t know that. Nor that there will no longer be 500, but 300 deputies.

It is also unknown that the citizens will be the ones who choose the electoral advisors and the magistrates of the Electoral Tribunal, he added, in a gloss of his proposal.

The President showed a video in which one of the attendees at the November 13 march, against the proposal, asks that the INE remain as it is.

López Obrador considered that people attended this march well intentionedbut they they got into the head that the register will be managed by the government, that it will be the President of the Republic who appoints the INE advisers, or that with this he seeks re-election. A big liehe expressed.

He defined it as a problem of lack of information or supine ignorance, “because, even if I wanted to re-elect myself – not only do I not want to, but it would go against my principles, my ideals, my honesty, which is what I value most important in life–, I could not do it, because a constitutional reform is needed. But the situation of misinformation is delicate.”