Politics: AMLO begins the year with a major setback as the presidential succession heats up
2023 is shaping up to be an especially crucial year for President López Obrador’s Fourth Transformation (4T) project, and he suffered a major, totally unexpected setback just as the year was getting underway. His preferred candidate to become Chief Justice of the Supreme Court January 2 saw her chances evaporate when it was not only shown she had plagiarized the thesis with which she had obtained her law degree, but also that she tried to lie her way out of the mess, dragging AMLO and Mexico City Head of Government and front-running candidate for the Morena presidential nomination, Claudia Sheinbaum, into an effort to deny the evidence.
That cleared the way for the election of Minister Norma Piña, a low-profile jurist with a record as a very competent constitutional lawyer and history of consistently opposing the current administration’s interests in cases before the bench. This greatly complicates AMLO’s ongoing efforts to rewrite campaign laws and stack electoral regulatory bodies with loyalists ahead of the 2024 presidential elections.
Although the two gubernatorial contests scheduled for this year (Coahuila and State of Mexico) are unlikely to be a preview of the presidential race, they could help energize the opposition should Morena fail on the election day, which looks very possible in the former state but is less certain in the latter, the country’s most populous state. Following the June elections, the political agenda for the second half of the year will be largely reduced to the process of selecting presidential nominees which will foreseeably take place between September and October of this year.
The media will be focused all year on speculating who will be Morena’s standard bearer. Sheinbaum is the clear frontrunner and the president’s favorite at this point, but that could change if she starts slipping in the polls, potentially stoking infighting and even open splits in the Morena camp. Meanwhile, the PAN-PRI-PRD alliance has promised to field a common candidate next year, but they also face major hurdles involving the candidate selection process and how to integrate the civil society groups that mobilized in the hundreds of thousands last November.
Now read on...
Register to sample a report