Vote for change or propaganda tool?
Mexico’s president top promoter of his recall election
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 Andres Manuel Lopez 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 Lopez Obrador,” reads one flyer. “If you don’t participate, the corrupt ones will take away the scholarships, assistance and pensions that we receive today.”
Lopez 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 Lopez Obrador. He 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 Lopez Obrador.”
On a recent day 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 Andres Manuel that he has the strong backing of the people,” Pozos said. “Andres 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 Lopez 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.
Lopez Obrador has also won points with symbolic gestures, like 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 Lopez Obrador has already 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.
“They should have promoted the referendum from the start, not acted dishonestly, keeping silent, not promoting the vote so that people wouldn’t know about it, putting polling booths as far away as possible,” the president said at a recent news conference, referring to the electoral institute. “They’re openly against us, against me.”
The institute asked the federal government for more money to oversee the contest, to little avail. With only about half the budget it said it needed, the watchdog installed about a third of the polling stations it would in a normal election.
Lorenzo Cordova, leader of the electoral institute, known by its Spanish acronym INE, said he is being set up to fail.
“It’s not just the president,” Cordova said, “there is an orchestrated, systematic and well-designed campaign to discredit the INE.”
The point, Cordova said, is to “damage the referee, and eventually pave the way for its political capture.”
The nation’s Supreme Court has said political parties cannot advertise the recall, and yet, Lopez Obrador’s face has cropped up on signs around the country.
Cordova says the electoral institute has not determined who is paying for all of the ads, but said there are at least twice as many of them in states where the president’s party will compete in elections for governor in June.
“It makes you suspect there’s political intentionality,” behind the marketing campaign, Cordova said.
There are, of course, strategic benefits that could come from asking the country to weigh in on whether they like the president at this particular moment. Lopez Obrador founded his political party and has an obvious interest in doing everything possible to ensure its victory in general elections to replace him in 2024.
The voting patterns in the recall will tell the president where his side’s weaknesses are — and which of the potential candidates for president can get people to the polls.
“It’s a kind of experiment, a rehearsal,” said Blanca Heredia, a professor at CIDE, a Mexico City research institution. “Looking ahead to 2024, he can measure the capacity of his operators to mobilize the vote.”