According to the uses and customs of his former party, the sixth year of government of a president of the Republic was the first year of his successor designated by himself, by his finger.
López Obrador has ignored that tradition. It is very likely that reason will assist you not to follow it. His candidate, his, who his party accepted as the PRI accepted those designated by the presidential finger, is not taking off in the popular mood less than four months before the election, although the polls published in the national press give her a wide advantage.
The president, who is no fool when it comes to Mexican politics, knows this and has decided to break the rule of this sixth year of government, which also – a plus– the young people will say – allows him to intervene like never before and like no one else in the presidential succession process.
He knows that contrary to the polls that are also published day in and day out by traditional media and on social networks, the government candidate is not assured of electoral victory and he believes that he must come to her rescue, like no president who has emerged. of his former party he did.
The PRI tradition, as embodied by López Obrador, also establishes that the candidate, in this case (calm down, calm down, don’t be alarmed by the defenders of sex) candidate of the official party, establishes that the anointed one must “break” with his predecessor, even if it’s just lies. That is, publicly distance oneself from the current government, which will have no continuity; that the next one will be a new government, headed by who will now be the Messiah who will solve all the problems of the country and each and every one of its citizens, to whom the revolution will finally do justice. Unfortunately, many of those who will vote for the opposition candidate have the same hope.
That is what the 20 legal initiatives that the president announced on February 5 are about, although he knows that 18 have no chance of being approved in the current Congress of the Union. But for now he has already managed to get the opposition to play into his hands by supporting the populist reform of the pension system so that Mexicans supposedly now retire with 100% of their salary. Yes, a populist and absolutely electoral proposal: imagine a presidential candidate saying that she does not support that “proposal” because of its economic viability. Well no, if she says it she will lose votes.
And the president is not willing to do so. He knows and bets that he has between 17 and 30 million beneficiary voters (bought) with government scholarships and pensions, but now he does not believe that they will guarantee him victory and so he must run a new campaign, as he already does.
Until today, the opposition has not realized that what it should seek is the vote of those who, election after election, do not go to the polls, the abstentionists who believe that public policies do not affect them… until they realize when They can’t do anything anymore.
The statistics do not lie, they are not surveys, and they say that if those usual abstentionists go out to vote, the opposition will have a greater margin of probability of victory.
That is the challenge of the opposition candidate: to convince those who do not vote to vote, even though she has already convinced many others, even though the parties that support her are no guarantee, not even an illusion.