Politics: What the next Congress may bring
With President Andrés Manuel López Obrador’s Party together with its allies wielding a qualified majority in the Chamber of Deputies and just shy of one in the Senate as the new session of Congress gets underway, their legislative agenda becomes de facto that of the entire Congress. And judging by the priorities that have been announced so far by President Andrés Manuel López Obrador and the National Renovation Movement (Morena) party leaders in both chambers of Congress, the fundamental criteria that determined the choice of prime objectives is the need to consolidate and deepen the government’s transformation project along political and social policy lines.
Given the extent to which there are fears that an economic recession could threaten such a consolidation, the administration’s 2020 revenue and spending budgets are being tailored to reassure everyone that public finance will be managed responsibly alongside the promotion of investment in the energy sector and investing in public security.
More specifically, AMLO is insisting that the government will keep public finance balanced, however, there is as yet no indication of how he intends to raise the funds needed to sustain his ambitious social policy agenda and efforts to bailout and reinforce the country’s main public sector companies (Pemex, CFE). So far there are only promises of a further tightening of austerity policies that are unlikely to deliver the funding necessary to seriously develop these policy priorities.
AMLO has ruled out any sort of fiscal reform that might expand any existing revenue sources or introduce others. And there is a risk that the more extreme versions of austerity and budgets reallocation that are being considered will continue to erode the efficacy of the administration policies that the current president does not regard as priorities, and in the process aggravating the weakening of policy areas such as science, technology, the environment, many other social programs and the adequate functioning of autonomous bodies.
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