MEXICO CITY – For a president with a declining economy and the fourth number of COVID-19 deaths shown worldwide, Andrés Manuel López Obrador of Mexico does not do so much damage.
By the time the state of the union faces on Tuesday, Obrador is expected to promote his anti-corruption crusade and his public works projects, which are his two biggest obsessions, though few that eventually achieve much.
Surprisingly, it still receives 52% help for a coronavirus policy that amounts to little more than damage control with the least amount of evidence imaginable and almost no tactile tracking or mandatory blocking, but focuses on expanding the number of hospital beds.
“Control of the pandemic has been bad,” says Luis Miguel Pérez Juárez, professor of political science at the Universidad Tecnológico de Monterrey, and called the president “joke” that the president almost never wears a mask.
Mexican President Teflón’s honeymoon is obviously over and he has more time on the dizzying approval rates he ever had.But according to a ballot published Monday through the newspaper Reforma, Obrador still has an approval rate of 56%; this is below a peak of 78% in March 2019.The in-person survey had a margin of error of four percentage points.
“No one has been to force him to report more the genuine numbers” of coronavirus cases that are far higher than official figures due to lack of evidence, said Federico Estévez, professor of political science at the Instituto Tecnológico Autónomo de México.
“People obviously recognize that things aren’t going well, in the economy, on the street,” Estévez said, though he noted that Obrador still enjoys the majority.”It doesn’t hurt you.”
Obrador’s anti-crime strategy also failed; Homicides are locked at about 3,000 a month in this country of nearly 130 million people, roughly the same point as in the past two years. The drug cartels continue their bloody turf battles, and cocaine thefts and fentanyl pill exports continue.
Obrador hopes his greatest legacy will pass to corrupt politicians who have stolen millions of dollars from beyond administrations.
A grim series of videos and testimonials leaked in recent weeks has reinforced the long-time idea that previous administrations were full of scammers, but they provide little legally admissible evidence.were brought in through a former director of a state oil company waiting to go to jail.
Obrador “uses it very well, but the concept that will allow him to go to the bottom of things and punish those responsible, I do not see him for the moment,” said José Antonio Crespo, political analyst at the Mexico Economic Center: research and training,
In fact, 58% of respondents in the Reform poll thought corruption would lead to concrete results, while only 28% thought the suspects would go to jail.
But with no space to boast on the economic front (GDP fell by 18.7% this quarter), the anti-corruption crusade may be a key component of Obrador’s strategy for the 2021 midterm elections, in which it hopes to keep its bare minimum.majority in Congress and gain more governors for their Morena component.
“This will be the central strategy of the crusade for 2021, to make the biggest challenge the afterlife, to provide,” Crespo said.”The beyond corruption in the neoliberal administrations against which it fights, unemployment, poverty, coronavirus deaths, violence by drug gangs; the offer where there’s too much to brag about.
With less government budget for next year due to economic collapse, López Obrador can simply compensate for the decline in government generosity by adapting more nationalists, on a path like the one taken by populist governments in Poland and Hungary, Said Estevez: blaming “cosmopolitan elite” or foreign interference.
López Obrador has already given signs of that. Last week he accused environmentalist and Indigenous rights groups of being paid by foreign foundations to oppose his “Maya Train” project, a costly and barely feasible project to connect beach resorts, Mayan towns and archaeological sites on the Yucatan peninsula.
Like its massive oil refinery structure, at a time when oil costs are low and countries are turning to renewable energy, the exercise is internally constrained and has provoked the wrath of some Mayan communities.
But criticizing foreign influence is popular in Mexico.Recently enacted legislation banning the sale of junk food to minors has been designed to target comfortable snacks and drinks from American companies, while exempting many calorie-rich Mexican delights.
“We went on to move towards opposing appeals to the cosmopolitan elite,” Estévez said.”In a nationalist crisis, that has been a Mexican tradition.”
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AP editor Maria Verza contributed to this report.
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