Biggest promoter of presidential recall election? The president
MEXICO CITY » Strolling through Mexico’s capital these days, it would be easy to assume the country’s president is at imminent risk of losing his job.
City streets are littered with signs, flyers and billboards urging Mexicans to vote on whether to remove President Andrés Manuel López Obrador from office in a recall election Sunday.
Only it isn’t the opposition telling people to rush to the polls. It’s the president’s loyalists.
“Support President López Obrador,” reads one flyer. “If you don’t participate, the corrupt ones will take away the scholarships, assistance and pensions that we receive today.”
López Obrador has called the recall “an exercise in democracy,” but critics say it actually amounts to something far more cynical: an effort to bolster the president’s claim to power — and a tool to undermine his detractors.
Opposition leaders have told their followers to boycott the exercise, and analysts believe turnout could be too low for the results to even count.
The vote’s most enthusiastic promoter — and the person most keen on putting the president’s well-established popularity to the test — has been the president himself. López Obrador proposed the recall, the first of its kind in Mexico, and analysts say he will use it to manufacture a political victory even if participation is low.
“This is supposed to be a mechanism for civic control of power, but it has become instead an instrument of political propaganda,” said Carlos Bravo Regidor, a political analyst and critic of the administration. The governing party, Bravo Regidor said, “wants this to be a show of force, of muscle and capacity to bring people into the streets and make explicit their support for López Obrador.”
On a balmy Monday in Mexico City, volunteers in the president’s camp fanned out across a residential neighborhood armed with flyers and wide grins, cheerfully advertising nearby polling stations and telling anyone who would listen to go vote in the recall.
Allan Pozos, one of the group’s leaders, said he hoped the exercise would “set a precedent” so future leaders could be kicked out if needed. This time, though, he just wants the president to know he is loved.
“It’s to show Andrés Manuel that he has the strong backing of the people,” Pozos said. “Andrés often feels alone, because he has to go against an entire system and doesn’t have support.”
Such a show of support could not come at a better time for the president, who has passed the midpoint of his term while struggling to deliver on key campaign promises that swept him into office in a landslide victory in 2018, when he proposed this type of referendum. He vowed a “transformation” of the country that would drive down poverty, jump-start the economy and tackle endemic violence at its roots.
But after a pandemic and a global recession, poverty rates remain stubbornly high, economic growth is anemic and homicides are still hovering near record levels.
But López Obrador has remained very popular, with more than half of Mexicans approving of his performance, polls show. His government has sought to improve the lot of the poor, raising the minimum wage four times and boosting welfare spending.
López Obrador also has won points with symbolic gestures, such as turning the presidential mansion into a museum open to the public and flying commercial, even when visiting the United States.
His high favor with voters is also a tribute, supporters and critics agree, to his relentless broadcasting of an official narrative in which he portrays himself as a lone warrior for the people, going up against a corrupt establishment.
The main risk of the recall for the president is the possibility that large swaths of the country just ignore the exercise altogether, especially as it takes place on Palm Sunday. By law, for the vote to become binding, at least 37 million Mexicans, 40% of the electorate, need to participate in it — significantly more than the number of people who voted for the president in the 2018 elections that swept him into office in a landslide.
But López Obrador has identified a scapegoat in case of low turnout: the country’s electoral watchdog. For months, he has been attacking the National Electoral Institute over what he sees as a failure to dedicate enough resources to advertising and administering the recall vote.