Politics: The cost of concentrating presidential control
The debate over President Andrés Manuel López Obrador’s handling of Covid-19 remains a topic of intense discussion amid growing doubts as to the official version of the pandemic’s progression, the degree to which the health system is coping amid the crisis, and the legal maneuvers the government is engaging in to impose greater control over public spending and reduce transparency.
There are many reasons to believe we are looking at serious undercounts that cannot be entirely attributed to basic weakness in the organization of diagnostic services. Official case and fatality rates have grown increasingly encouraging for reasons that do not appear obvious, as are the reproduction and duplication rates. Weeks ago the authorities stopped publishing testing numbers that were extremely low to begin with. Some mathematicians have offered much higher multiplication factors for extrapolating the epidemic’s spread from the nationwide sample of hospitals and clinics the authorities use. Officials have deflected attention away from hotpots such as Mexico City when discussing the relative saturation of the hospital system, preferring to focus on national averages and leaving President López Obrador free to complain he has everything under control.
In a sign of how successful the government’s media saturation strategy remains, the latest polling shows a clear majority of the public continues to believe in official pandemic numbers and trusts the government is doing a good job of managing the crisis. Meanwhile, there is little space in traditional media in which specialists can put forward their critiques.
Unless critical analyses can get through to the citizenry it will become all the easier for AMLO to take advantage of the crisis to consolidate his political project and tighten his centralization of power while whittling away at transparency and accountability rules. As an intensification of the heath and economic crises loom, a presidential initiative poses threats to the constitutional order, the division of powers, federalist expenditure criteria, transparency and accountability. But he may have overstepped in this regard, as even leading members of his own party have publicly expressed their opposition to an effort to rewrite the Federal Budget and Fiscal Responsibility Law, and his congressional leaders warn it will not pass unless major changes are made to the reform bill.
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