The president of Mexico, Andrés Manuel López Obrador, in a conference this Monday.Mario Guzmán / EFE
President López Obrador's decision to remove Olga Sánchez Cordero as Secretary of the Interior has had several readings. There are those who have made them reside in the merits and defects of the until recently incumbent. There are those who suppose that we are facing a change in strategy after the poor results of the elections and of the government's own management. There are also those who speculate the existence of a plan to counterbalance the actions of the Morenoist majority leader in the Senate. Without knowing the relevance of these explanations —or others that might arise—, it seems possible to point out the existence of yet another one: the lifting of the scaffolding to finish building and to maintain its legacy.
I dare to consider that, for the short term, the president has thought about what would happen if he could not continue in the exercise of his position. We know that in accordance with article 84 of the Constitution, the Secretary of the Interior will provisionally assume the ownership of the Executive Power for up to a period of sixty days. Then, since the first two years of his mandate have already elapsed, the Congress of the Union should appoint a substitute who will conclude the period for which he was originally elected.
For someone who, simultaneously, begins to feel both the effects of greater political violence and rejection in certain social sectors, and at the same time does not want to change their patterns of public behavior, the issue of continuity in the public should be a cause for concern. post. If, in the event - in no way desired or certainly suggested - that he could not continue in office, who and how could construct the immediate representation of the greatness of the legacy in the eventful and crucial days that were to follow? Knowing the importance that López Obrador gives to history and its meanings, and also to the need it has to be in it in an adequate way, I think that the appointment of the new Secretary of the Interior fulfills that fatalistic possibility and, I insist, never desired.
In addition to this emergency aspect, I believe that the replacement of the Secretary of the Interior in the person of Adán Augusto López Hernández may have a more complex and long-term meaning. Playing the game of succession that reminds us of the PRI years so much, President López Obrador has begun to generate the lights and shadows that some of his predecessors gloated so much. The insinuations, the placements and the displacements, the buried and express words and, finally, the accumulation of signs that they made of the covered and their uncovering, are the essential pieces of the national political culture of an entire era. The president has named some of the people who could succeed him. With this, he generated movements, false starts and individual and group positions.The designated persons are identified and are already part of a process that, at the same time, summons and transcends them.
As he saw it done and apparently liked it, the president will go looking for who, among all his covered, will receive his support. In this field of possibilities, he will have some of considerable size, and will receive his support who is able to convince him that his legacy will be assured. That only he, and no one else, will end up giving him his place in national history, with all those details and views that he has imagined. That he will have to be in charge of telling the founding epic of the myth with which López Obrador hopes to be picked up in and by history.
López Obrador's succession game does not lie only in identifying who can succeed him.
Not even in not betraying him.
What in addition to the above has to achieve, is to find who, with the most absolute loyalties, ends up configuring it.
This need, it seems to me, not only complicates the already open succession game, but also explains, to a great extent, the arrival of the new head of the Ministry of the Interior.
From the loyal and constant friend to the place from which, also historically, the old rulers of a Republic came out that, it is thought, is already passing through its fourth stage of transformation.
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