Politics: Generalized decline and confrontation
The government continues to apply austerity measures instead of any minimally credible plan for mitigating the economic crisis, much less preparing conditions for an eventual recovery. There is no solution in sight for mounting public finance problems, and the president’s insistence that he will not agree to any expansion of the public debt with which to support industry and social groups affected by the pandemic guarantees that sooner or later he will fail to live up to his promises as both tax revenues and oil income dissipate.
The Covid-19 pandemic has radically altered the economic, social, political and temporal context of López Obrador’s governmental project. Nevertheless, as the epidemic in Mexico continues to grow to troubling levels, the government remains doing baseless claims that it has peaked and the number of new infections and deaths will soon subside while analysts and epidemiologists raise doubts about plans to gradually resume normal activities nationwide beginning June 1.
The government applies the brakes to the electric industry reform with terrible consequences for the environment while discouraging remaining foreign investors that may have harbored illusions about this president.
All of these negative developments have been accompanied by the same tired official discourse, with the president turning up the volume on his attacks not only against his traditional targets, but even against doctors who he accused recently of having been only interested in making money out of their patients in the not-too-distant neoliberal era.
Scenarios of the country’s immediate future are far from promising. Most probably they will entail a growing confrontation over the acceleration and radicalization of López Obrador’s project. The basic questions that demand answers, but for which there is as yet no clear response, are just who might lead an opposition at a time when business leaders have lost much credibility over their members, opposition parties are non entities, and dissident state governors are bogged down trying to contain the epidemic and the economic crisis on their immediate home fronts.
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