Mexico is governed by two presidents: the maker and the preacher. The two are inside Andrés Manuel López Obrador. On the one hand, there is a transformative politician with enormous practicality and an enormous will to carry out his projects. It is invested with a social conscience rooted in its own trajectory and in the knowledge of the territory and its inhabitants, particularly those most in need. This character is a maker by nature; As mayor of Mexico City, he left an imprint in the capital that still defines it, from the renovation of the Historic Center and the second floors, to the social programs that were later imitated in much of the country. Right now, as head of the Nation, in just fifteen months he has launched a barrage of projects and institutions that are transforming political practices and public life: the National Guard, universal social security, educational counter-reform, universal system of pensions, reform of union life and much more. We can agree or disagree with the goodness of many of these projects, and only time will tell if they were the most successful, but no one can accuse him of inactivity. At least as regards the distribution of income or the fight against corruption, the first results are positive, but not the performance of the economy or insecurity, issues on which the president asks for a little more time. Even if in privacy he may have reservations, his pragmatism has led him to reconcile with President Trump, with the great businessmen of Mexico or with monetary policies of austerity and budgetary balance, all of them areas naturally against his leftist populism.
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But another president also lives in it. The preacher, the spiritual guide of the nation, the wise man who knows our past and unravels the true origin of our evils, the one who day by day reveals who the bad Mexicans are and exhibits them. That other president has Madero closer to his heart and his tragic execution more than a hundred years ago than the crime against the girl Fatima, which shocked the country, or the wave of feminicides that has women and men on the warpath in the last days. This president floats somewhere between Benito Juárez and Madero (originally included Lázaro Cárdenas, but now he rarely mentions it); his enemies, the conservatives, are the same as his two heroes.
It seems to me that the two dimensions have always been present in López Obrador and even benefited each other. In this amalgam, so to speak, the maker used to predominate, enriched by the horizon of visibility of the idealist. But after hearing hundreds of Mañaneras throughout these fifteen months, I have the impression that the preacher is gradually imposing himself on the practical politician. His historical digressions are increasingly widespread and many of them without coming to the case, his calls for good and universal love are more frequent, his flaming finger never gets tired to denounce the moral failures of villains (press and columnists in his opinion Preachers of the conservatives).
This Tuesday's session is symptomatic. President Manuel López Obrador affirmed that his Government distrusted specific measures and improvisations regarding abuses against women and that he was convinced that the only solution was to go to the source of all the evils to solve them. The true origin of calamities such as insecurity, poverty, injustice and inequality is neoliberalism and the use that conservatives made of it. This dehumanized neoliberalism made moral values dust, prohibited abuse and dishonesty, generated family breakdown, says the president. A specific question about actions regarding feminicide said that conservatives were the cause and to show it he cited Lucas Alamán, the right-wing ideologist who 150 years ago offended a woman.
And it is there that we lose the president-maker, the practical politician, the one who could have been sensitized to crimes against women (ten femicides a day in recent weeks), respond promptly with actions and campaigns against machismo and get ahead of the aggrieved community.
On the contrary, the spiritual leader and pedagogue has decided to focus on the evils of modern society, as if Mexico could isolate itself and become a Shangri-La. If the solution is to get out of neoliberalism and the dehumanizing consumer society, the chances of moving the country forward are broken. This would be seen by the maker president, but not the preacher president.
We live in a world under the realm of market economy; We have just confirmed a trade agreement with the United States that integrates and subordinates us to the logic of capital; and the private initiative is responsible for 75% of what the country produces, regardless of what the Government wants or says. Moreover, the ubiquitous and growing globalization (from the aesthetic and moral criteria of the series that we see on Netflix or in the cinema, the applications that we open on our phone or the advertising of the products displayed on the super shelves, for example) obvious), it is little less than impossible for the 4T and its preaching to reverse the values that, in the opinion of the president, have caused the breakdown of the traditional family or community morals. It is one thing to clean up practices and norms to hinder corruption and impunity in public administration, and another to believe that we can renew the moral values of the consumer society in which we live.
The president-maker has a good opportunity to lay the foundations for a less unequal and less corrupt country, beyond successes and mistakes, that there will be. In that sense Mexico needed a López Obrador and now that it is in the Palace we are facing a historic opportunity. The preacher president, on the other hand, has the battle lost beforehand if he ignores the maker and intends to transform the world into what cannot be. I am concerned about his growing interest in Francisco Madero, the martyr president, whom he commends because he failed because of the perversity of his enemies even though he had truth and historical reason on his side. I would love that the balance of his six-year term was what he did in favor of a fairer country and not the lament of the great and sacred objectives that his adversaries prevented him from achieving. We will see which of the two presidents ends up prevailing.
@jorgezepedap
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