López Obrador turns the page to the 2023 elections and looks at next year's presidential elections: "I'm not going to put the Morena candidate"

Andrés Manuel López Obrador during his morning press conference on Monday. Moisés Pablo Nava (Cuartoscuro)

The president of Mexico, Andrés Manuel López Obrador, has been satisfied with the results of the local elections on Sunday in the State of Mexico and in Coahuila, in which his party, Morena, obtained a triumph in the first, snatching from the PRI its historical bastion and adding for his movement one more territory of political influence. The president has recognized the citizens for having exercised their right to vote, has congratulated the two elected governors, the Morenoite Delfina Gómez in the State of Mexico and the PRI Manolo Jiménez in Coahuila, and has promised them collaboration with his Government without distinction of political signs. The president has thus turned the page and has set his sights on 2024, in which the presidential succession and the renewal of the two Houses of Congress will be played. López Obrador said on Monday that in the last year of his Administration democracy must be consolidated in Mexico and has assured that he will not get into the internal process of Morena for the definition of the presidential candidacy, that he will not tip the balance for anyone and that he will not send signals. Instead, he has placed his faith in the method of polling for citizens to decide who will champion their movement.

"If we want to establish in Mexico, as we are doing, the democratic habit, we need to banish all those anti-democratic practices," López Obrador said in his morning conference, "completely banish the purchase of the vote, intimidation, the use of the public budget to favor candidates and parties, the carrying, the falsification of the records, the stuffing of the ballot boxes, the vote of the dead, the dedazo, the covering, the imposition. [You must] sweep away, put an end to all that, and that applies to everyone, and to the parties in the selection of their candidates. It is not that I am going to put the candidate of Morena, no, there will be no dedazo, it will be the people, it will be the citizens who will decide. And there are still those who do not believe it, even people close to him: 'At the time of the hour you are going to tip the balance'. No! Or, 'We're waiting for a signal.' You're going to wait, first cousin," said the president, the sole leader of Morena.

The ruling party will go into the 2024 election with renewed verve after Sunday's election. Despite the defeat in Coahuila, Morena has given a blow to what López Obrador calls "the old regime" having triumphed in the State of Mexico, where the PRI had governed uninterruptedly for 94 years. The election results have left a lesson for both sides in dispute: on the one hand, the ruling bloc grouped in the coalition Together We Make History (Morena, Green Party and Labor Party); on the other, the motley opposition bloc Va por México, formed by the PRI, the right-wing PAN and the leftist PRD. The leadership of Morena will try to pedagogically use the electoral balance to instruct the presidential corcholatas: in Edomex, where the Obradorista movement triumphed by more than eight points, there was a solid union around Delfina Gómez; the opposite case of Coahuila, where the ruling bloc was pulverized by disagreements between the candidates and lost by more than 35 points.

Once Sunday's election day has passed, the two blocs in dispute have entered fully into the succession process of 2024. The leader of Morena, Mario Delgado, has assured that from this Monday he will contact the candidates to refine details of the announced work table to define the method of internal selection. The head of the capital's government, Claudia Sheinbaum; the Secretary of Foreign Affairs, Marcelo Ebrard; Interior Secretary Adán Augusto López and the leader of the Moreno majority in the Senate, Ricardo Monreal. For its part, Va por México will have to evaluate how much the partner parties of the alliance contribute to a triumph or how much they are more a burden and a method of survival of each one.

López Obrador made accounts this morning of the drag of his movement in territorial terms. He has said that Morena has executive power in 22 of the country's 32 states, counting Morelos, which governs Social Encounter (PES), a defunct partner of the ruling party. The other 10 states are divided into governments of the PRI, Movimiento Ciudadano, the PAN and the Green Party, which is also an ally of Morena. The PRD, where López Obrador was a member until a decade ago and which today is a partner of the PRI, has been practically erased from the map. "I was very pleased with yesterday, the truth, I celebrate," the president said Monday, "and I will talk to those who triumphed, at the time, to tell them that they will continue to receive all our support, because it is our obligation to do so. And the election was right."

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