“He’s the best president we’ve had in 70 years,” the retiree said this week as she prepared to bombard her phone calls with urgings to support him Sunday when Mexico goes to the polls. However, Latin America’s second largest economy is not running in the presidential election – the next one will not take place until 2024. Instead, voters will be asked a simple question in Mexico’s first national election: whether President Andrés Manuel López Obrador will step down his, or not? Lourdes, an ardent “Obradist” who regularly posts memes in favor of Lopez Obrador on social media, has no doubt about how she will vote on the ballot, which, unusually, was supported by the president himself. López Obrador, a 68-year-old populist who came to power in 2018, argued that the referendum is a way to hold the executive accountable to the people and prevent government corruption. De Lourdes agrees. “Now with the impeachment, future presidents will have to think long before betraying the people,” he said. Mexico was for many years a de facto one-party state, in which the conservative Institutional Revolutionary Party (PRI) ruled continuously for more than 70 years until 2000, and then another six between 2012 and 2018. Fighting corruption and ensuring transparency were among the key campaign promises of López Obrador, better known as Amlo. However, during his three years in office, the international anti-corruption organization Transparency.org has documented only a positive 3% change in corruption levels. Amlo’s acceptance rating fell for a few weeks in February after it was revealed that his son had rented a multimillion-dollar mansion in Houston owned by a senior executive of an oil company that trades with the Mexican government. In a recent poll, more than half of Mexican voters said they did not think the vote was necessary. But hardline Amlovers – as the Mexican president’s fanatical supporters are known – want to be different. “If only we could do that [recall a president] before, we could have avoided so many tragedies, so many deaths, so many financial failures. “Now we have the power to dictate the future of Mexico, we Mexicans – not just the most privileged leadership of the past that felt untouched,” said Karla Reséndez, an Amlover from Nuevo Laredo, Tamaulipas, who works as a rancher. However, Amlo’s tenure has seen its own share of deaths: the president has been repeatedly accused of riding a pandemic in a pandemic that has claimed the lives of some 323,000 Mexicans. Violence, meanwhile, remains at an all-time high and this year Mexico has reached 100,000 people who went missing in the drug war. However, if we want to trust the recent polls, any calls for the removal of the president this weekend are in vain. Amlo’s acceptance rates remain high and the projected 70% of voters will choose to keep him in office. In order for the vote to be certified, if it is actually revoked, the turnout must reach 40%. Many other public referendums in the last two years, including one on the possible immunity of former presidents, received only 7% of the vote. Although the results of the revocation election are unlikely to come as a surprise, the cost of this procedural vote has reached 1.6 billion pesos, about $ 80 million – in fact only half of what the government originally requested. Reséndez believes the vote is worth the money, as it could save money in the country in the long run. “In the past, the government rescued private banks and put us in a lot of debt. “Now we have the opportunity to evaluate the performance of the government and prevent it from happening again.” Support for the president is so strong that some opposition groups have even urged supporters to vote “continuously” or not to vote at all and wait to overthrow Amlos in 2024. “You’re done [the term], then you leave! ” a sign at a rally against Amlo read last week.
