It is true that everything here seems monumental. It’s the same as a museum, a park, a supermarket or a homicide rate. Everything is big, full of people and loaded with history. It is also true that in Mexico many important things happen at the same time and in different places, because this country is actually several countries in one. So politics (or what many of us understand as politics: government, parties, elections) can sometimes seem like background noise. A topic that hardly deserves to be discussed, as if it didn’t matter who occupies what. But not everything is the same: the arrival of Claudia Sheinbaum to the presidency is a fundamental milestone in the history of the country twice. Because she is the first woman in office and because she arrives after an election that consolidates Morena, the ruling party, as the political phenomenon of this time.
Sheinbaum won with almost 60% of the votes, the party achieved a qualified majority (two-thirds) in the Deputies and is on the verge of achieving it in the Senate. He also held the capital. It is a better result than the one obtained in 2018 by Andrés Manuel López Obrador, the ubiquitous reference of the entire campaign and of the speech that Claudia gave in the Zócalo of Mexico City, a huge rectangle located in front of the government palace that has a flag of 230 kilos in the center. It was already early morning and all the faces in the square were visibly exhausted, although smiling. Above all Claudia, who during the campaign was criticized for not showing feelings and appearing cold, a perhaps unfair description but one that reflects the profile of a scientist whose driving style is very different from that of AMLO, a narrative machine. It was a short speech, but loaded with symbolism. “I don’t arrive alone, we all arrive,” she said at the beginning.
It was not a popular festival. The square was much less crowded than at the beginning and end of the campaign, when the downtown streets were rivers of people with Morena flags arriving from all over the country. Yesterday it was easy to walk through the Zócalo and move again and again through the 15 blocks that separated it from the Hilton hotel, where Sheinbaum gave his first speech to the media. Perhaps it was due to the imminence of victory, a result discounted since the beginning of the contest, which once again broke a record of political violence. Sheinbaum and his team executed a neat campaign with almost no errors, although also with little epic; The message was served and it was none other than that of continuity.
Yesterday’s square serves to dimension that legacy, which can quickly become a challenge. Street vendors, as is usual in the city center, sold AMLO dolls, AMLO portraits, AMLO socks, AMLO key chains and AMLO’s latest book (in the hotel where the international delegates were waiting, the thesis was even distributed degree from the president). Only some vendors had included dolls of Claudia, or the occasional photo of the two leaders together. Some supporters also reformulated the traditional chant of “it’s an honor, being with Obrador” to “being with Claudia today,” but the asymmetry was evident. “The president’s popularity is unbeatable. That’s why she won,” a vendor near the plaza told me. On Sunday the trend had not reversed: the majority of sales were dolls of the president.
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Sheinbaum, a 61-year-old physicist with the pedigree of Mexican progressivism (from the south of the city, academic parents linked to the UNAM, a biography marked by the student protests of ’68), developed her political career under the guidance of AMLO. She accompanied him as Secretary of the Environment when he won the City leadership in 2000; She supported him on his national tour after the 2006 federal election in which the current president denounced fraud; She was one of the party’s first organic mayors in 2015, and was finally elected as head of government of the capital the year AMLO became president in his third attempt. Since then, the public differences with the Morena leader have been minimal: stricter criteria for managing the pandemic, the reluctance to deploy the military in the city compared to the rest of the country (one of the great challenges of the next six-year term: what do with the militarization that consolidated the outgoing administration) and greater consideration of official data.
Doubts about the role that AMLO will adopt after leaving office contribute to the transition dilemma. Few believe that he will go to his ranch to write and that’s it, as he promised. “The president is only going to appear to order,” a Morena leader told me in a burst of confusion. The private comments of Claudia’s internal collaborators and rivals, tinged with machismo, also aggravate the problem. But there is one thing that is certain: although the idea of a hegemonic party is not at all new in Mexico (this was what the 20th century was like with the PRI), AMLO’s leadership and centrality have no recent parallels. It has been the axis of Mexican politics for more than twenty years. During her presidency he has not only managed to remain in the center (thanks, among other things, to an exercise in virtuous communication) but has consolidated and expanded his popularity, an anomaly among his regional peers.
I was thinking about that while looking at the platoon of electoral observers: about how Mexico, for a part of continental progressivism, went from being an ideological puzzle to a kind of success story (in conditions that, to be frank, are unrepeatable in almost any country). region of). I was glued to the postcards of Evo Morales and Alberto Fernández, the two most brilliant guests and in a certain way the two temporary ends of a broken and orphaned cycle of references. One day before Claudia’s victory, Bukele took office in El Salvador, the most popular politician in the regional right-wing ecosystem, and the figure who seems best in tune with the spirit of the times. In terms of popularity, AMLO is the only living mirror on the left. And now in Mexico, a structurally sexist country, a woman with a progressive profile will govern for the first time in its history. It’s true: these are strange and dark times, difficult to read. I guess these are interesting times too.
