The elections held this Sunday in Mexico, with a historic participation, have issued a message that must be heeded by President Andrés Manuel López Obrador. The elections, in which the strategic Chamber of Deputies, 15 governorships and 20,000 public offices have been renewed, were proposed from the beginning by the president as a plebiscite to his management and his ideological roadmap, the so-called Fourth Transformation. Always aware of his popularity, the head of state threw all the fuel on the fire to obtain a qualified majority in the Chamber of Deputies that would allow him to reform the Constitution and remove the last obstacles to his project. Although the polls have expanded his territorial power, in a clear culmination of the change that began with his victory in 2018, they have also curbed his greatest ambition.
López Obrador's party has lost seats and only maintains an absolute majority with the help of its partners from the Green Party and the Labor Party. Analyzed with equanimity, it is not so much a failure, as many in the opposition wished, as an indication that mid-term López Obrador has reached parliamentary ceiling and that the time has come to ease the tension.
The dynamics of the last few months could not have been more harmful for Mexico. With his sights set on these elections, the president has opened one front after another. Judges, businessmen, journalists, feminists, non-governmental organizations and political rivals have been publicly beaten and intimidated for not following their designs. A strategy aimed at placing López Obrador at the absolute center of the board and consolidating his popularity among its bases, but which has opened deep and dangerous fractures. In this offensive, the specter of an involution in matters as delicate as energy and justice has also emerged, where the president has defended solutions more typical of the 1970s than of the 21st century.
With the possibility of a qualified majority disappearing, the wings of presidential maximalism are clipped and its mistakes are prevented from becoming irreversible.
Now it is up to him to manage what is possible and, if he wants to change the structures of the State, seek consensus, something to which he has been allergic so far.
The elections have also exposed the weakness of the opposition.
The PRI and PAN continue to pay the bill for their ominous past and, although they grow, they are still marginal forces in the face of the presidential elections of 2024. This vacuum poses a danger to Mexican stability, since it represents a fertile territory for the political adventures that germinate. so much damage has been done in America in recent years.
A separate chapter deserves the most painful side of these elections. With more than 90 assassinations and hundreds of armed attacks, Mexico has suffered a terrible escalation of political violence during the campaign. Although its etiology is diverse, it can hardly be separated from the government's inability to curb the most virulent criminal organizations.
These are lessons the president should be quick to learn. Beyond your dreams of historical significance and moral primacy, there are bloody events that require your intervention. It is necessary that realism once again occupies the rectory of the State. Now that the second part of his mandate is about to begin and that the perimeter of his power has been delimited, López Obrador has to listen to the message of the citizenry and dedicate himself to building a country where dialogue prevails on disqualification, the pact on the enforcement and crime law.