Election Pledges Give Way To Reality in Mexico
MEXICO CITY — Winning Mexico’s presidency this summer did not slow down Andrés Manuel López Obrador: Three months into his transition, he is traveling across the country to thank voters, replay his campaign promises and pledge, “I will not fail you.”
But now there’s often a caveat: “We wish we could give more.”
Mr. López Obrador was elected by a landslide in July on a mandate to battle corruption, reduce soaring violence and tackle the country’s entrenched inequality. Now those promises are colliding with reality.
As a result, he has backtracked on his commitments, trying to whittle down outsize expectations.
He is renewing his pledges to provide cash grants for young people, higher pensions for retirees, price supports for farmers and loans for small business. Only now he adds, “We are not going to spend more than what comes in,” as he told a rally recently.
Instead of pulling the military off the streets as he had once suggested, Mr. López Obrador now admits that Mexico’s ill-trained, underpaid police forces cannot protect citizens and that the soldiers will remain for the near future.
He has also flipped between stating that the economy is in solid shape to declaring that the country is bankrupt, and he recalibrated a plan to increase oil production by about 30 percent in two years. Now he says it will take six years.
Some analysts say these shifts might be the result of an adjustment to the reality of governing.
As he prepares to switch from the opposition to the role of president on December 1, Mr. López Obrador “is seeing Mexico with different eyes for the first time,” said Jesús Silva-Herzog, a political scientist at the School of Government at the Tec de Monterrey in Mexico City. Others are less charitable. “Someone who has almost 20 years of experience campaigning and still does not know what to do shows that either he isn’t very concerned about change through policymaking — or he does not know how to do it,” said Vidal Romero, a political scientist at the Autonomous Technological Institute of Mexico, a university in Mexico City.
Mr. López Obrador “isn’t president yet and already he is administering disappointment,” said Carlos Bravo Regidor, the director of the journalism program at CIDE, a Mexico City university.
Governing requires solid institutional capabilities that Mexico does not have, Mr. Bravo added. Building those, he said, is a slow and painful task that does not render results in the short term. “He believes that strong, honest leadership can go a long way,” Mr. Bravo said. “But there’s a point where that sort of an iron will is not enough.”
Nowhere is that more obvious than in dealing with Mexico’s violence, where the new government will have to take on the escalating murder rate and the impunity associated with 12 years of the government’s drug war.
Tackling the problem requires more than the good will of the president, analysts said. It requires effective law enforcement — and Mexico has weak judicial and police systems which, in many cases, have been co- opted by or colluded with organized crime.
While Mr. López Obrador has already made significant adjustments to his promises, Mr. Silva-Herzog said, more may be in store.
“The reality,” he said, “will prove to be much more stubborn than what he expects.”