The foregoing comes to the fore because the verbal headline that is most frequently heard among those who do not support the so-called “4T” is that “there is no opponent capable of standing up to the government”. In this insipid hope of finding the new hero to replace whom many of them consider to be a “tropical messiah”, there has been no shortage of those who revive political corpses that, long ago, lost presidential campaigns or those who shuffle the names of businessmen, athletes, actors, controversial legislators or even public servants of autonomous bodies.
It is true that AMLO’s coming to power is explained, to a large extent, by the breakdown of the three most important political parties in the last 20 years. But it is also true that Morena is the product of the gradual agglutination of people and groups that, for a long time, were left unprotected – to say the least – by the traditional party regime. It is to those citizens that AMLO, every morning, speaks. This is their strategy to consolidate their electoral mass. It is they who have found a leadership that, they believe, takes into account some of their most heartfelt and ignored demands.
Therefore, waiting for a high-ranking statesman to emerge from the ranks of the old parties – those archaic structures that many of those who voted for AMLO decided to punish in 2018 – is naive to say the least.
Having an efficient government opposition, a necessary condition in any modern democracy, does not mean waiting comfortably for a new political idol to “emerge”. Even from a comparative perspective, examples like these usually turn out worse than their predecessors. Nor is it enough, by the way, to shout ad nauseam that democratic institutions are being eroded by the authoritarian ambitions of the government in turn.
