Politics: A small but crucial cabinet shakeup highlights possible governability issues
In recent days President López Obrador replaced Minister of the Interior Olga Sánchez Cordero while also accepting the resignation of Julio Scherer Ibarra, the man who had served not only as presidential legal counsel but also as a de facto interior minister while also assuming many of the key tasks left behind by the departure last December of AMLO’s Chief of the Office of the Presidency. In addition to his formal responsibilities as legal adviser, Scherer’s tasks included everything from administration relations with key ministries and autonomous bodies, to negotiations with political parties and congressional leaders.
The man who is expected to pick up many of the pieces as the new interior minister is the departing Tabasco Governor Adán López Hernández, whose main qualification is his roughly four-decade friendship with and loyalty to the president. Not a terribly auspicious start to the second half of the administration at a time when governability is increasingly at risk and tensions mount within the administration and Morena with the presidential succession already in view. In fact, his first and least enviable task will be to bring order to the governing camp, somehow coordinating all the groups and interests that have coalesced around AMLO’s 4T project.
What remains to be seen is the type of relationship the president desires with political, economic and social actors outside of his political project following three years in which this government has rarely engaged with such actors. Having lost its commanding majority in the Chamber of Deputies one might assume that building bridges with opposition politicians would be a priority if the administration hopes to continue to pass crucial legislation and reforms. But might such overtures be accompanied by the same sorts of prosecutorial threats against opposition politicians that we have seen so far?
The president’s decision to largely dismantle much of the state security apparatus, his hands-off approach to organized crime and radical protestors alike, and his lax approach even to his own personal safety, as highlighted by his being detained for two hours by dissident teachers last week, suggest security risks will continue to grow.
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