Politics: Missteps and looming crises
As President Andrés Manuel López Obrador is faced by the usual dynamics of any new administration – confronted with a situation considerably more complicated than the new head of state and other incoming officials had anticipated, the commission by new officials of numerous unforced errors, and struggling to quickly deliver on crucial campaign promises – he has increasingly acted in ways that rather gratuitously enraged critics, including many private sector forces. By always striving to disqualify such potential interlocutors, claiming to have at his disposal "other facts" with which to contradict the inconvenient hard evidence posed by journalists and others, and constantly overruling members of his own administration, he is further complicating his governing tasks and widening the fault lines that are further polarizing society.
More troubling is the discretionary manner in which he tends to apply the law, going so far in recent weeks as to order members of his own cabinet to ignore laws not to his liking or that he deems would be inconvenient to enforce in certain circumstances.
Although there is no recent polling data to show whether these developments have weakened his approval ratings, we can assume AMLO remains highly popular. When not engaging in the outbursts and dubious legal approaches that have stoked the wrath of a relatively reduced yet powerful segment of society, AMLO has dedicated most of his time to rolling out and touting his social programs and the distribution of subsidies throughout the country. So far he has embarked on 30 tours that have taken him to almost every state to formally launch social programs locally and hand out initial cash transfers to young people, the elderly campesino farmers, and others. Hence, while the roughly quarter of society that disapproves of López Obrador is becoming more irate and more adamant in their opposition, the rest of society appears content to wait for promised benefits to flow from multiple social policy programs.
Can the president’s popularity weather the mounting policy challenges and deepening polarization, or might unforeseen crises undercut his government’s social legitimacy?
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