Lawmaker quits in blow to Mexico president

AMexican lawmaker quit from the ruling National Regeneration Movement (MORENA) of President Andres Manuel Lopez Obrador, dealing another blow to the leftist leader as pressure mounts over his performance.

Lopez Obrador’s approval rating dropped to 46.5% in a daily survey by pollster Mitofsky, versus about 80% early in his term, as the sheen wears off promises to tackle graft and prioritise the poor that brought him a landslide election win in 2018.

“I am leaving the MORENA bench over differences of opinion,” Lily Tellez, who represents the northern state of Sonora, said on Twitter. “I am now a senator without a party.”

A senate spokeswoman said Tellez was the first senator to leave MORENA, which Lopez Obrador created as opposition for Mexico’s largest parties, including the long-ruling centrist Institutional Revolutionary Party (PRI).MORENA was registered in 2014, and, along with its allies, took a majority in Congress when Lopez Obrador came to power.

Tellez, a former news host on television channel TV Azteca, had previously survived an internal attempt to remove her from MORENA over concerns that she did not share party principles.

MORENA’s senate leader, Ricardo Monreal, said he had defended her from the ouster, and was sorry to see her go.

“She has voluntarily decided, but we’re staying firm, because this is a long fight,” he said.

Morena and its allies still have comfortable majorities in both houses of congress.

Late last month, Tellez lashed out on Twitter at Lopez Obrador after he shook hands with the elderly mother of convicted drug kingpin Joaquin “El Chapo” Guzman in an encounter caught on video.

“This handshake is an offence to the victims of narco-trafficking and to Mexico’s armed forces,” she said, calling the images hurtful and concerning.

A poll from newspaper El

Financiero showed support for MORENA, never as popular as Lopez Obrador himself, slipped to 18% in March from 33% in January.

Meanwhile, Lopez Obrador has proposed bringing forward a referendum on his presidency to June 2021 from 2022, challenging his opponents to accept the offer and vote him out of office.

Critics of the leftist president’s management of the economy, his security record and handling of the coronavirus pandemic have increasingly urged voters to use the self-imposed “recall vote” on his performance to get rid of him.

Lopez Obrador proposed the early vote on his six-year term, and initially wanted to hold it on the same day as mid-term legislative elections in June 2021.

Fearing he would use the vote to put himself at the centre of the 2021 elections, the opposition balked at the idea and forced him to move it into the spring of 2022.

Now that Lopez Obrador’s popularity has fallen sharply, opponents have seized on the referendum as an opportunity.