On April 15, 2000, there was a PRD rally in the Plaza de la República. Andrés Manuel López Obrador’s candidacy for the head of the Federal District was on shaky ground. There, AMLO asked that it be the people who decided whether he could compete or not, given the legal challenge regarding whether he met the residency requirement in the capital. In the end, he was allowed to be on the ballot on July 2, and the rest is history.
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A foundational myth of Obradorismo is that its leader was all along a victim of the powerful’s schemes to exclude him from the elections. At the mentioned rally, Carlos Ímaz, then PRD leader in the capital, said: “They want to win unfairly because they don’t know how to do it any other way.” Five years later, Vicente Fox’s disqualification attempt against AMLO seemed to confirm such suspicious accusations.
That is why few should have been surprised that during his presidential term, López Obrador dismissed all kinds of legal or administrative resources that prevented his fellow party members from participating in an election. One of the clearest cases was when Raúl Morón and Félix Salgado Macedonio were excluded from Morena candidacies in the elections of Michoacán and Guerrero, respectively.
On April 14, 2021, when rejecting the decision of the National Electoral Institute, which severely sanctioned those Morenistas for failures in their pre-campaign reports, ultimately canceling the aspirations of Morón and Salgado Macedonio and forcing Morena to change candidates, AMLO complained in his morning conference:
“If we go to the core, which is what matters, in democracy the people rule. Demos is people, kratos is power, it is the power of the people, the people are sovereign, not the apparatuses, the structures, the people are the ones who decide in democracy, they are the ones who rule, it is even established in Article 39 of the Constitution, the people have at all times the right to even change the form of government, the people are sovereign. So, why prevent the people from deciding? Why not let the people of Michoacán, the people of Guerrero decide? If they are bad citizens, so what? Can’t the people judge them, disapprove of them, or choose them?”
Almost two years later, on March 22, 2023, when recalling his disqualification attempt in the morning conference, López Obrador insisted on the topic: “So, I cannot allow anyone, neither in Mexico nor abroad, to have their political rights affected, I consider it an injustice, but also an attack on democracy, because if you have a rival, an opponent, an adversary, well, you have to beat them fairly and let the people decide, not the economic or political elite of a country, the so-called ‘political society,’ with its bureaucratic apparatuses.”
And finally, on April 18, 2024, weeks before the elections in which Claudia Sheinbaum would win, Andrés Manuel emphasized his position that everyone should be allowed to compete: “That’s why we always say: don’t fabricate crimes, don’t try to take away anyone’s right to participate. I suffered a disqualification attempt, and do you know why they wanted to disqualify me? So that I wouldn’t participate as a candidate, that is, they wanted to eliminate me unfairly. That’s why, when they talk about disqualifying a candidate, I don’t agree. Who has to disqualify? The people. That’s what democracy is for. It’s not a matter for the police, not a matter for public prosecutors, not a matter for judges. Democracy is the power of the people, for the people, with the people; in democracy the sovereign is the people, they are the ones who rule. So, we have differences, there are different positions, because that’s also democracy, there must be plurality, not everyone should think the same, there is no single thought, how do we resolve our differences? By asking the people, with the democratic method, like that.”
For all the above, this week’s announcement by President Claudia Sheinbaum is a 180-degree turn from what AMLO said, that “if they are bad citizens, so what? Can’t the people judge them, disapprove of them, or choose them?… let the people decide, not the economic or political elite of a country… don’t try to take away anyone’s right to participate.”
Amid the crisis caused by Rubén Rocha’s rebellion, who by his own will returned to the governorship of Sinaloa last Friday, forcing the president into a struggle to make him desist from his attempt and finally start dismantling the Rocha faction, Sheinbaum suddenly announced that she will send a bill to limit the right to be voted for.
What seemed like an offhand phrase in Tuesday’s morning conference — when the president said she was considering sending a bill so that no one seeking to occupy the presidency or a governorship could have, or request, another nationality — within 72 hours became a formal announcement that the reform was already drafted and would soon be sent to Congress for processing.
“What we are proposing is (…) that once they register, which is the moment they want to be president or head of the executive of some state of the Republic, they must renounce any other citizenship, if they have it, and only keep Mexican nationality, to guarantee that the interest of the nation is above any other interest of any other state or nation in the world,” Sheinbaum said on August 27.
For the president, the people — those in which millions of families have relatives in the United States who when they could opted to also be U.S. citizens — should not be the ones to decide if someone in that legal condition is the best person to assume a governorship or even the presidency of the Republic. Those who for a quarter of a century promised to open and defend rights, cancel them.
Although some will say that dual nationality is the subterfuge of some politicians pursued by Mexican justice — on Tuesday when Sheinbaum revealed the genesis of this initiative she spoke of former PAN governor Francisco Javier García Cabeza de Vaca, who has dual nationality and lives in the United States — what is revealing is the trampling that the president gives to the precepts of the former president.
The people must be tutored, is Claudia Sheinbaum’s message, lest they vote for an agent of another government, we suppose she meant. At this rate, how long until, according to the government and its party, the mere fact of holding dual nationality makes a Mexican suspicious of little patriotism or even disloyalty.
Moreover, the formal announcement of this initiative came the same day the president got involved in electoral matters, not to mention in favor of her movement, which is wrong but no longer surprising, but by endorsing the controversial order of the INE and the Electoral Tribunal against the Somos México party, which the referees force to change its colors, name, and remove the term “Mexico.”
“Because calling a political party Mexico, I don’t think anyone can put the name Mexico on their… and less Somos México, that’s my opinion.” Again, the presidential opinion which is a stakeholder due to her militancy and activism in favor of Morena, placed above her duty to safeguard the people’s right to decide for themselves if they like the name of the new group, even if it includes “Mexico.”
The Somos México issue is not exempt from the irony that this former member of the Party of the Democratic Revolution (it is said Sheinbaum was a founder of the PRD youth wing) now agrees with maneuvers that complicate life for a new electoral option: when the PRD was born it was forced to change colors because the patriotic colors belong to the PRI. Life’s twists. For decades, PRI authoritarianism made a twisted homage to Porfirio Díaz in claiming the authority to know if the people were ready for democracy, to freely choose their rulers. López Obrador promoted the opposite so much that that was his argument for the ill-fated popular election of judges, magistrates, and ministers. Let the people decide, let the right to be voted for not be curtailed…
The second tier of Obradorismo has other ideas. Dedicated or not to Ricardo Salinas Pliego, a television businessman who fights Obradorismo even with rude manners and the weight of a concessioned media outlet, or as an outburst of frustration at the inability to stop opponents with dual nationality, the crux is that President Sheinbaum does not want to risk letting the people decide.
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Could it be that they have discovered the charm of “winning unfairly”?