Andrés Manuel López Obrador and Morena, the party that supports his government, confirm their dominance of Mexico's political board, but they get stuck in the Chamber of Deputies. The results of the rapid scrutiny of the intermediate elections this Sunday, released by the National Electoral Institute (INE) at eleven o'clock at night, point to a fall of the official bloc, which would go from 313 seats to 279, maintaining in any case a loose absolute majority. At the same time, the opposition alliance made up of the PRI, the PAN and the PRD is recovering and would increase its assets from 136 seats to 197. According to these data, Morena is consolidated as the country's leading force and, in the absence of the results of the States, is on the way to expanding its territorial power.
López Obrador's party had so far 256 of the 500 deputies. However, most of those seats were obtained in the process of forming the Chamber in 2018 after the transfer of its allies, the Green Party, the Labor Party and the PES. The latter is about to disappear, but the alliances will allow him to maintain the baton of the legislative agenda. Even so, the president's ambition to achieve a qualified majority, set at 334 seats, two-thirds of the total, remains far from being fulfilled.
The self-proclaimed fourth transformation of López Obrador will extend his power in the territory, although the data confirm his failure in Nuevo León, one of his main bets.
In the State, the industrial and economic heart of the country, the regionalist sentiment embodied by Samuel García prevailed.
The young politician of the Citizen Movement is about to prevail over the traditional apparatus of the PRI and Morena, whose candidate, Clara Luz Flores, collapsed after meeting, in March, the meeting held by the leader of a sect sentenced to 120 years in USA.
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Andrés Manuel López Obrador, greets after casting his vote.
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The federal and local elections, the largest call in the history of Mexico, have reflected a certain erosion of the president's party, which has not yet reached the halfway point of the six-year term.
The correlation of forces limits his room for maneuver in Congress.
To promote their political project without hindrance and to be able to pass constitutional reforms, López Obrador and Morena would have had to have the support of at least two-thirds of the lower house.
That is the spring it needs, for example, to unblock its energy plan, which after the parliamentary process was paralyzed by justice.
The results will gauge the power of the president, Andrés Manuel López Obrador, an omnipresent figure on the Mexican political scene in the face of the dismantling of the opposition that rushed after his victory in the 2018 elections. The correlation of forces in Congress, the projection of the The ruling party, Morena, and the distribution of territorial power will also set the starting point for the next presidential elections in 2024, which are already concentrating all eyes on a country where there is no re-election.
López Obrador has spent three years trying to promote what he describes as the “fourth transformation”, a set of structural reforms with which he intends to leave a mark on the country's history. The constant references to two of his models, Presidents Lázaro Cárdenas and Adolfo López Mateos, help to get an idea of that ambition. Despite the fact that the context today is radically different from that of the middle of the last century, there is still a conception in part of the Mexican left that the true heads of state nationalized energy resources.
In recent months, the president has accelerated his plan with a package of energy laws that seek to revolutionize the electricity and hydrocarbons system by strengthening two state companies, the Federal Electricity Commission (CFE) and Pemex against private initiative.
The two measures are stuck in the courts, but that course has ignited all the alerts of the economic sectors, also reflected by the increasing flight of capital, just as the justice reform has unleashed a melee between the governor and the government. judiciary.
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