From the gray house to revocation
The rejection of the president’s electricity reform by opposition deputies on April 17 was another trigger for polarization.
But this already existed and was growing from previous weeks, due to external issues that contaminated and dominated the legislative debate in the Senate and in the Chamber of Deputies.
These are the mandate revocation process, the scandal over the so-called “gray house” in Houston of the president’s son, José Ramón López Beltrán; the presumed failure of the Felipe Ángeles International Airport, and the rejection by environmentalists of the change of layout in the construction of the Mayan Train, among other issues.
For Rodrigo Salazar Elena, professor-researcher at the Latin American Faculty of Social Sciences (FLACSO), this prevailing climate between Morena’s legislators and their allies against the opposition is deliberate and directed from the Presidency.
López Obrador is not the first president to assume this confrontational stance with the opposition benches, he specifies, but he has his originality: “he does it publicly from his mornings, and then it is as if he blew the trumpet announcing the order to attack the cavalry to broaden that confrontation,” he explains.
AMLO: rejection of the electricity reform is a betrayal of Mexico
“The president uses his conferences to set the tone. If the president says traitors to the country, we immediately see three bands that follow the line. In the first, the chambers of the Legislative Power, especially the Chamber of Deputies. In the second, the pens of the regime, related intellectuals, and in the third, his followers on social networks.
All of them collect his speech, his insults, “they take it as a slogan”, they reply and magnify, which explains the penetration that these verbal aggressions now had.
“This epithet of traitors to the country fell on the opposition from these three fronts and it is clear that if they are attacked, they would not remain silent” and they have responded in a very similar way to the attacks.
Paralysis of constitutional reforms
Just on Monday, May 2, at a press conference, the leaders of Va por México: Marko Cortés, from the PAN; Alejandro Moreno Cárdenas, from the PRI, and Jesús Zambrano, from the PRD, also came out to defend themselves with a barrage of adjectives “political mercenaries”, “cynics”, “gangsters”.
The reality is that “neither of the two parties seems to have high sights” -says Salazar Elena- and although before, even confronted, the legislators maintained a middle ground for the negotiation of the presidential legislative agenda, now this seems to be canceled, points.
That is why today what is appreciated is a “very unfavorable climate for the opposition to grant López Obrador new legislative whims” such as his electoral reform, says the FLACSO academic.
