The path is marked.
Four months before the elections that will take away his ranch, President López Obrador released this Monday at the National Palace a package of constitutional reforms that is both a legacy and an electoral program.
There are the policies in which he believes and those that he has not given time or did not want to enshrine in the Constitution when he had the majority to do so.
In the final stretch of his mandate, the moment becomes more opportune, with the electorate waiting for a message to go out and vote, because no matter how much it would like to, the president's party, Morena, will have to negotiate with the opposition if it wants to move forward with these legal modifications, unless he wins two-thirds of the seats in Congress on June 2.
The Morenistas will be satisfied when they hear these arguments in favor of the poor, of the indigenous, of raising the salaries of teachers, doctors and police, of ensuring a daily wage for the peasantry or guaranteeing a minimum wage for a year for the training of young people. who do not study and cannot find work;
return to the Federal Electricity Commission its charge as a strategic public company as well as grant the people the possibility of voting for judges and enshrine social and educational aid in the Constitution.
That is, “redirect public life along the path of freedom, justice and democracy.”
Grandiloquent words for an electorate that expects them.
He also had nods to environmentalists, for example, restricting the use of water in areas of scarcity only for domestic use, for those waiting for the train, 18,000 kilometers that passengers will be able to travel, he promised;
Other items are of the most populist taste, the one heard in the canteen: reducing the number of politicians in Congress and the Senate or not allowing any official to earn more than the president.
And so on up to 20 measures with which he approaches the end of his journey and lays the sleepers along which his successor, Claudia Sheinbaum, must navigate.
The electoral campaign will be crossed by an intense parliamentary debate, profitable for the Government party, which leaves the opposition at the crossroads of bowing to negotiation in search of a position that does not affect their interests on the way to the polls.
A few minutes after the speech, the president of the PAN, Marko Cortés, came out to announce that they will analyze "responsibly" what López Obrador announced and criticized the president for avoiding the most serious issue facing the country, insecurity, as he did.
The president barely mentioned the idea of “severely penalizing the crime of extortion carried out by organized crime.”
Violence is the great failed subject of this six-year term that the opposition clings to again and again, as they did this Monday.
That and the elimination of autonomous organizations, such as the INAI, for administrative transparency, the Cofece, for economic competition, and the body that regulates energy, among others, will be the shields that will protect the right in its fight against a government who intends to exhaust the mandate with the same vigor as whoever was starting it.
The negotiations in the Chambers will capture the public's expectation before deciding their vote.
The worst scenario opens the curtain on the alliance members, who will have breakfast every morning with the diatribes of a president who has known how to turn electoral campaign issues into legislative action.
The PRI described it as “nonsense” that certain reforms, attacks, they said, “against the institutions,” were announced on the day of the Mexican Constitution.
And he attacked the electoral desire of the message: “Morena seeks to engage the opposition in a sterile and directionless discussion.
“They know that they do not have the votes to carry out this assault on democracy.”
The PRI announced their red lines: they will not vote against the disappearance of autonomous organizations, “the weakening” of the Judiciary, issues that can affect the electorate, as happened in the past with the government attacks on the INE.
“Do not count on the PRI to destroy the country.”
In the celebration of the 1917 Constitution, López Obrador resorted to a patriotic speech, very much to the Mexican taste, through which all the heroes of the past circulated, the constituents and the martyrs of Independence and the Revolution, the makers of a great Mexico that They sank, said the president, more than 40 years of neoliberalism.
In that historical framework he placed his own legacy.
Obrador rises to the presidium of illustrious Mexicans as the architect of the change in the mentality of the people, what he calls “the revolution of consciences.”
“But it would be a mistake to trust ourselves and miss this historic opportunity to strengthen values and give the Constitution its democratic and social character,” he said.
The opportunity has already passed, in reality, now he can only rely on the ballot box or reaching agreements with the opposition.
The message, then, is electoral.
What is not achieved in these legislative chambers, citizens will have only one way to obtain it, by voting for her successor, Claudia Sheinbaum, who has guaranteed ideological and political continuity to everyone who wanted to listen to her.
We all fit in here, Obrador called to the voters: “Now the students, the young people, the women, the elderly, the indigenous people, the peasants, the workers, the artists, the teachers, the merchants, the small and medium-sized businesses,” he continued with a rally script.
There is, however, no trace of political offensives that could cause problems with sensitive sectors, such as the economy, especially at voting time.
The president mentioned the “important task” of combating inequality “with a better distribution of wealth, income and the budget,” but among the reforms he sent to Congress that night the tax reform was not included, one of the most clamorous issues. that remains in the debt of this six-year term.
Nor was there any allusion to measures that caused diplomatic problems, or they were not presented with the discursive intensity enjoyed by others.
The president's proclamations were the same ones that have presided over his mandate and those that he has been introducing into the public debate for weeks from his morning conferences, raising criticism from the opposition, because they consider that Obrador exceeds his executive role to get more than dangerously close to the arena. electoral.
Bringing his policies to the Constitution, in details as minor as the prohibition of consuming fentanyl or the use of vaping devices, cannot only be a way to rise as a historical leader, in the Olympus of those he admires, it can also be interpreted as electoral gestures or simple decoys to bring the negotiations to a successful conclusion.
“You cannot govern based on the impulses of a capricious will,” he quoted Juárez.
It does not seem like a whim that drives the president to propose these enormous reforms, rather a very calculated shot.
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