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MEXICO CITY.- A president who leaves with his popularity intact. A candidate from the ruling party who he comfortably won the presidential election, and is preparing to take up the mantle and continue with his political project. At first glance, anyone might think that Andrés Manuel López Obrador leaves him to Claudia Sheinbaum a better country than the one he received. But the reality is more complex.
Sheinbaum will receive a heavy inheritance and a long list of challenges in the National Palace, as large or larger than that of López Obrador himself when he took office almost six years ago. At the top of that list: the unsafety.
Sheinbaum called López Obrador “the best president in history” closing her campaign in the Zócalo of Mexico City, but her political boss, founder of the movement that took her to the top of power in Mexico, leaves the most violent six-year period in history with more than 176,000 murdersa fractured societya country that depending on where one lives may or may not be in the hands of the drug trafficking and organized crimethe largest fiscal deficit –5% of GDP– and the lower economic growth since the late 1980sand a weariness and resignation among the people with the corruption and impunitywhom he had promised to banish.
Like his predecessors, Sheinbaum must find a formula to solve the scourge of criminal violence –López Obrador’s recipe of “hugs, not bullets” failed–, unresolved for decades, trying to reconnect people with politics, and design a recipe to give a boost to an anemic economy that, despite the social improvements of the last six-year term, it still does not work for everyone.
Unlike all previous presidents, he will also face two other challenges: being the first woman to take the reins of a country accustomed to seeing a man at the helm, and dealing with the presence of López Obrador. AMLO, as he is popularly known, promised to retire to his ranch in Chiapas, “La Chingada”, but In Mexico there are those who believe that it will never completely go away.
That is why, in addition to solving the most pressing problems for people, one of Sheinbaum’s initial tasks will be build a force of political gravity of its own under the shadow of López Obrador. Although he has been in Mexican high politics for more than two decades, strikingly, no one knows for sure how he will do it, whether he will try to deepen López Obrador’s turn or, on the contrary, offer a more version Lightmore moderate, without the controversies and populist overtones of the factory.
If Sheinbaum steps on the accelerator, he goes all out and moves forward with the call “plan C” proposed during the campaign – a series of controversial constitutional reforms, including electing Supreme Court judges through popular vote –, will face the same popular rejection that was seen at the end of López Obrador’s six-year term in the “Pink Tide” marches. More social and political tension.
Sheinbaum not only endorsed the measures of that plan, which for his critics would put the signature in the death certificate of democracy in Mexico by accentuating the authoritarian drift that AMLO printed during his government: he made it his own.
“You see that the president gave us a task, I don’t know if you have heard it in the mornings recently, a task called ‘plan C’, well I say it is Claudia’s ‘plan C’,” said Sheinbaum. at the end of the previous year at an event in Yucatán.
A Radicalization of the course set by López Obrador would allow Sheinbaum to establish herself as leader and heir of Morena, but it would further strain a society who, at times, seems accustomed – resigned? – to living with the usual problems. The minds of Mexicans are not on “plan C”, but on unsafety.
A variant is that Sheinbaum look for a more moderate trailwithout the populist profile of López Obrador and his “them and us” logic, and focuses on solving problems, leaving aside controversial reforms and preserving the most popular achievements of the Workplace, such as social programs. Sheinbaum promised continuity with change. Mexicans will discover sooner rather than later how much there will be continuity, and how much change.
