“Amlo will remain Amlo”: The Mexican president is constantly suffering from central bruises

If Mexican President Andrés Manuel López Obrador were to be punished for his losses in the midterm elections, he has not shown up.

The day after the June 6 vote, the government published a law extending the order of Supreme Court President Arturo Zaldívar, who is close to the president, a template that critics fear could lead López Obrador to extend his term from 2024 onwards.

A few days later, the president vowed to carry out constitutional reforms in the areas of energy, elections and security, however. he lost a two-thirds majority necessary for such changes in Congress. He accused the “malicious, slanderous, immoral” media of poisoning voters against him and attacked the middle class as a selfish social climber.

Despite the passionate rhetoric, for some it changed López Obrador’s business to a more radical agenda than it seemed, after his Morena party lost about a fifth of the congressional seats and more than half of Mexico City’s constituencies.

“It’s clear that Amlo will continue to be Amlo, and it’s something that companies and society need to learn to live with, we won’t change that,” said Antonio del Valle, head of Mexico’s Business Council, representing the country’s largest companies. using the nickname of the president.

“But after three years, we can now understand that just as it will not change politically, it will not change its economic policy either… And that reassures me a lot.”

High-ranking business leaders have learned to overcome the fiery message of the veteran populist and applaud how he has withstood the pressure of heavily indebtedness for large-scale spending expenditures, like other leftists in Latin America.

A chief executive who has asked not to be named has said the president’s “barking is worse than his bite.”

While he continues his rhetoric, many observers expect a small deviation from his long-awaited plan to achieve a blurred “transformation” in Mexico: social programs to address profound income inequality, poor infrastructure projects in the southeast to create jobs and energy self-sufficiency based on fossil fuels.

When he was mayor of Mexico City in 2000-05, when Lopez Obrador showed a pragmatic streak, “I expected him to be more moderate and he didn’t,” said Porfirio Muñoz Ledo, one of the few Morena party members of the Mexican Left and critical of the president.

López Obrador wanted to extend Zaldívar’s term to potentially secure the judiciary, and attacks on INE-respected electoral authorities and independent regulators have raised alarm bells.

“I hope it will not harden the presidency against organizations,” Muñoz Ledo said. “The Mexican presidency is already very strong.”

Claudia Sheinbaum, a supporter of López Obrador and mayor of Mexico City, said the election was an opposition effort to portray the election as the backbone of Mexican democracy with “this idea that it would be the last time we voted for the dictatorship.” ”.

Graham Stock, a partner at BlueBay Asset Management, saw a “limited opportunity” to radicalize López Obrador without a supermajority in Congress and dismissed comparisons made with the same authoritarian Venezuelan leader Hugo Chávez.

“He’s a fiscal conservative, so he won’t spend a little money on growth,” he said. “His opponents always tried to tell the story of chaos and destruction – I don’t buy that…. It’s not the next Chavez, it’s pretty special.”

After winning a landslide in 2018, López Obrador has remained loyal to supporters with distributions, higher pensions and large increases in the minimum wage. Refusing to take on more debt led to the lack of a Covid-19 stimulus program, which caused a deeper recession than many Latin American classmates last year.

Former PAN Conservative Foreign Minister Jorge Castañeda has said he believes López Obrador has lost the opportunity to make profound reforms to take advantage of his “tremendous legitimacy”.

“What you need to do is do what he didn’t do, even though he can do it: serious tax reform,” he said. López Obrador has promised to close the gaps instead of raising taxes.

“It may seem short-term, but the logic is pragmatic,” said Gerardo Esquivel, deputy governor of the Bank of Mexico. “All attempts at past fiscal reform have been political flops. . . He thinks it’s more transformative for people to pay what they need and get where their salaries need to be. “

The Mexican economy is now on the bounce After hiring 8.5 percent in 2020 and focused on 6 percent or more growth this year, President Joe Biden is backed by $ 1.9 billion in stimulus packages in the U.S.

But the atmosphere of uncertainty remains, driven by the cancellation of partly built airport and beer projects by López Obrador, weighing on the investment Mexico needs to overcome traditionally weak growth rates.

Lopez Obrador’s ongoing attacks on political enemies, including the wealthy, the media and the business class, have raised concerns about the risks of an already deeply broken and violent division of society.

“The most important thing is to stop the polarization of the country: the rich versus the poor, the northern and the southern,” said the chief executive of a Mexican bank. “We all need to row in the same direction for the boat to move forward.”