September 2020. Andrés Manuel López Obrador arrives at his second Government report with a stone in the way. A threat he had not provoked and could not control threatened to determine the course of his presidency.
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One six-year term later — we have waited six years until the planet is again at this point to be able to make the comparison —, history insists on getting in the way of the Fourth Transformation. Claudia Sheinbaum arrives at her second report under similar pressure and with an uncertain direction.
What covid-19 was for López Obrador, Trump is for Sheinbaum. Each one, their equation; each one, their unknown.
The second years of the governments of the Fourth Transformation have been faced — which, if I were superstitious, I would replace with doomed — with the same test: an external threat that breaks into the country when the presidency leaves behind the momentum of the electoral victory and begins the climb towards the midterms.
López Obrador faced a pandemic that stopped the world. On September 1 of his second year, the assembly at the National Palace accounted for the exceptional nature of what had happened. A few guests — all wearing face masks — watched a president who for years had fought vigorously to transform the country and who, suddenly, was forced to manage a pandemic. They say that if you want to make God laugh, just tell him your plans.
Covid-19 shook all the assumptions on which López Obrador had projected his Government. It paralyzed productive sectors, forced a reimagining of the once privatized health system, postponed reforms, displaced budgetary preferences, slowed the construction of major works, and so on.
López Obrador faced a dilemma. Either one or the other. Modify the priorities of his project to respond to the health emergency or fight from his founding principles.
The president chose the second. A reaction that would not be exaggerated to classify as consistent.
Despite pressures from the wealthy class to yield to the demand for fiscal stimuli, the president kept direct transfers and social programs at the center of his bet. That no and this yes. “For the good of all, first the poor” was consolidated as a non-negotiable Government policy.
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Sheinbaum arrived at her second report facing a comparable dilemma.
The return of Donald Trump altered the scenario on which she had calculated her six-year term. Tariff challenges and pressures on Mexico in political, commercial, migratory, and security matters did not even tangentially occupy the presidential campaign. Six years after the pandemic, history had other plans again. And God, if he had listened to Sheinbaum’s people, would have been rolling on the floor laughing.
Once again, a Government of the Fourth Transformation arrives at its second report with the agenda conditioned from outside: by circumstances it did not choose and could hardly have foreseen. The future is the worst enemy of what was imagined.
Again, the Obradorist response has consisted of adapting without renouncing the principle it considers central. In Sheinbaum’s case, that principle has been sovereignty: negotiating with Washington, cooperating as much as possible, avoiding trade ruptures and — lacking a more forceful weapon — leaving the limits clear. “Sovereignty is not negotiable” is a non-negotiable Government policy.
The similarity between both moments lies, of course, in the external nature of the pressures and the moment when they acquire all their strength. Absolute doubles. A diptych.
López Obrador could not command the end of the pandemic and, even so, paid part of its costs in the midterms via the ballot box. Equally powerless, Sheinbaum also has no choice but to keep dodging the Trump ideology.
Hot potatoes also reveal continuity. Faced with circumstances they did not choose, neither of the two governments opted to redefine the central principle of their project. López Obrador maintained the priority of social policy during the pandemic. Sheinbaum has made national autonomy the center of her response to U.S. pressures.
Coincidence or not, two administrations with wide margins of power found — precisely during their second year in office — that there are external forces capable of conditioning them.
And both governments have responded in the same way: adapting their plans without altering their principles.
It is clear that what has to be, has to be.
