The president of Mexico, Andrés Manuel López Obrador, has caused a controversy by not recognizing the victory of President Biden, claiming that he prefers to wait for legal disputes to be resolved and for official results.
"López Obrador and Donald Trump are a bit the same,"
said Mexican journalist Carlos Loret de Mola in an interview with Noticias Telemundo.
"It seems to me that López Obrador has this kind of brutal seduction by a figure like Donald Trump and by all that gang of leaders who have done the worst with the coronavirus pandemic around the world."
For Loret de Mola, who currently presents the news program 'Así las cosas' on the radio station WRadio and writes an opinion column in the newspaper El Universal,
there are two hypotheses
that can explain the position of the Mexican president.
On the one hand, "he does not want to contradict his own story, he does not want to ridicule someone who is claiming electoral fraud without any proof, because he did so himself," Loret said, referring to both occasions, in 2006 and 2012, when AMLO (as the Mexican president is known) did not acknowledge his defeat to Felipe Calderón and Enrique Peña Nieto, respectively.
After a closed-door meeting, both presidents gave statements in the Rose Garden at the White House.
AFP via Getty Images
The second option, the Mexican journalist points out, is
that AMLO "is thinking that Donald Trump is going to win in court
what he could not win at the polls and from there he is making a calculation."
On Saturday, it was announced that the vote counting in two key states in the US presidential election, Nevada and Pennsylvania, favored Democrat Joe Biden and made him president-elect, reaching 279 votes in the Electoral College, nine more than it takes to win.
This Biden lead could be expanded even further
, when the results for North Carolina, Arizona and Georgia are released, than are still counting the ballots.
The now president-elect leads Trump in both Georgia and Arizona.
Trump has refused to acknowledge his defeat, claiming without presenting evidence that there has been an alleged "illegal" vote count.
His campaign has presented legal challenges to the election results in at least four states, including Pennsylvania, which casts 29 electoral votes.
President Donald Trump leads Mexican President Andrés Manuel López Obrador through the west wing colonnade to a signing ceremony and joint statements in the Rose Garden at the White House in Washington, USA. REUTERS
"We are going to wait for all legal matters to be finished, we do not want to be reckless,
we cannot act, we want to be respectful of the self-determination of the peoples and the rights of others," López Obrador said at a press conference on Saturday, specifying his stance not to congratulate President-elect Biden.
In the 2006 Mexican presidential elections, AMLO recalled, foreign governments congratulated Felipe Calderón for having won him the presidency, although the vote count had not yet finished.
Since then,
López Obrador maintains that he was the victim of electoral fraud, in an election in which the winner was decided by a minimal margin.
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Back then, his supporters demanded a
"vote-by-vote, box-by-box"
counting
to make sure every vote in the country was reviewed.
However, the Mexican Electoral Tribunal decided that Felipe Calderón was the winner of the majority of the votes.
"We suffered a lot from the charges, from when the presidency was stolen from us one of the times and the votes had not yet been counted," he said.
Regardless if AMLO seeks to justify his own controversial behavior in past Mexican elections or if he is betting on an eventual electoral setback for Biden in the courts, something that most legal experts consider highly unlikely,
for Loret de Mola it is a way of "Start terrible relationship with the next president of the United States."
In July, when the Democratic and Republican campaigns were about to formally start, AMLO visited Trump in the White House, in the only trip he has made since he assumed power in December 2018. On that occasion, both leaders celebrated their "good relationship ”and phrases of praise were addressed.
"He praised Trump in an excessive way, in a way that offended Mexican migrants, who have been systematically insulted by Trump," said Loret de Mola.
"To the degree that Trump took fragments of López Obrador's speech and turned them commercial from his political campaign."
López Obrador has not yet recognized the victory of Joe Biden as president of the United States
Nov. 8, 202002: 37
But López Obrador also affirmed this Saturday that he has a good relationship with Biden
.
"With candidate Biden, the same, I have known him for 10 years that we met, I presented him with a letter informing him of the reason for our movement, for our struggle," said the Mexican president.
Although Loret de Mola has stressed that Trump's victory would have been convenient for AMLO, because "he felt that he had taken the measure" (which in his opinion is dangerous due to how unpredictable the US president can be), for
others
Mexican political
analysts
such as the columnist for the newspaper Reforma, Genaro Lozano, a specialist in international relations,
consider that the position of the Mexican president is rather cautious
.
“Trump is president until the morning of January 20, 2021. His outbursts can still cause a lot of damage to Mexico between now and then.
Diplomacy is making cost-benefit decisions, ”Lozano tweeted Saturday afternoon.
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