The great electoral test of López Obrador

Mexico celebrates this Sunday superlative elections that will define the governance that Andrés Manuel López Obrador (AMLO) will have in the second half of his six-year term. This is an unprecedented event: never before had federal and local positions been renewed, nor had so many voters been summoned to the polls on the same day, nor had there been so many attacks in the campaign, and even less so, had elections been held throughout the country in a pandemic context. The political battle is being played out on multiple fronts, but the media attention will be focused on the Chamber of Deputies, where the ruling party, Morena, aspires to renew the absolute majority that will allow its moral leader to complete his particular revolution.

DIRECT MEXICO | Opening of polls for the mid-term elections

This Sunday, 93 and a half million voters have in their votes the future of 20,500 public positions at all levels. Of the 32 states that the country has, 15 governors and 30 assemblies are renewed, as well as 1,923 city councils and 500 legislators from the Lower House. The color of the political map could change completely in 24 hours and the contenders have not been able to hide their nervousness. As the date approached, the tone and relevance of the elections have been gaining in intensity and relevance. The electoral campaign has lasted more than eight months and has been marked by the belligerent attitude of López Obrador towards the opposition, the critical media and the regulatory bodies of the election and, also, as usual, by the endemic violence suffered by the country.

According to the political consultancy Etellekt, between threats, insults, kidnappings or robberies, 782 attacks have been reported during the campaign, an absolute record in the historical series. 89 political leaders have also been assassinated, mostly rural and municipal opposition candidates.. Some of them – like María Rosa Barragán or Abel Murrieta – were riddled with bullets while they were carrying out campaign events. The majority of political actors have unanimously condemned this type of attack, but AMLO believes that the media are exaggerating “with the desire to make the environment rarer.”. Before they called it sensationalism, now it's sensationalism.”

The pulse that López Obrador has played with the National Electoral Institute (INE) has been another of the issues that has marked the agenda. After the regulatory body for the elections knocked down the candidacies of two candidates for governor for Morena -for not submitting reports on campaign expenses- and that it also ordered to stop broadcasting in full the broadcasts of the president's daily conferences – for containing “large doses of government propaganda” – López Obrador declared war on them: “it is the most expensive electoral body in the world and the last straw is that it is not to assert democracy, it is so that there is no democracy.”

In an interview with EL MUNDO, the president of the INE, Lorenzo Córdova, acknowledges that the polarization that the country is going through “is not new” but that, on this occasion, “it is acquiring truly worrying tones, we have heard absolutely unthinkable phrases, such as that the INE must be exterminated (…) these accusations had not been seen coming from a particular government, much less in those tones. Let's trust that these are isolated issues and not part of a general disqualification strategy of the results”.

The regulatory body for elections has been separated from the tutelage of the Government on duty since 1996. Since then, they have monitored – under the initials IFE, first, and INE, later – four presidential elections in which three different political formations have won.. As Córdova acknowledges, this circumstance validates the true independence of the organization and, therefore, he trusts that López Obrador will not take his threats to the last consequences: “I trust that they will not be the last elections that we organize. And if they were, then it would mean that the democratic system in Mexico has had a downturn, but nobody wants that, so we are going to defend the electoral system that we have given ourselves.”

The hegemonic figure of López Obrador and the overwhelming social support that the polls still guarantee him -with 59% approval- have pushed the opposition parties to group together in unprecedented electoral coalitions. Under the banners 'Va por México', the historic PRI, PAN and PRD aspire to conquer the government of several states and, especially, to try to wrest from the president and his allies the qualified majority in the Chamber of Deputies, thus making it possible to raise a political counterweight to the overwhelming 'Fourth Transformation' that has promised to impose the 'messiah' of the Mexican left.