Politics: The pros and cons of AMLO’s first 100 days
The balance sheet of President López Obrador’s first fourteen weeks in office is decidedly mixed. The political environment in Mexico clearly has been transformed, but it’s too early to determine the full implications of that shift, although we can say that the list of his positive accomplishments to date pales in comparison to the many points of concern.
The President has astutely managed the high expectations arising out of his electoral victory and further grown his political capital as well as his popularity. These developments have carried over into a brightening of the national mood, including a surge in general optimism, consumer confidence and even trust in the country’s democratic institutions. To its credit, the governing coalition has displayed flexibility in some key congressional debates, most notably on the National Guard, although that may have been more a product of the sense of urgency the administration felt to arrive at any solution that would keep the military on the streets for the next six years.
But all the positives fail to offset the multiple signs of negative developments that have accumulated over the past 100 days. AMLO’s central themes of austerity and anticorruption, though laudable at face value, have produced scant concrete results in rooting out graft, but have been deployed as a pretext for massive public sector layoffs, including purges of qualified top and mid level professionals and campaigns against personnel in regulatory and autonomous bodies. Overall, those moves have left many departments leaderless and significantly lowered the average professional quality of those engaged in public administration. In addition to measures designed to limit the space occupied by civil society organizations, and an intolerance of critical journalists and media sources, it all seems to point to a potentially authoritarian theme of sidestepping existing institutions and putting in place security and public administrative mechanisms that seem to have little logic other than that of centralizing all power in the hands of the presidency.
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