Maria de Lourdes loves her leader and desperately wants him to stay.
“He’s the best president we’ve had in 70 years,” the pensioner said enthusiastically this week as she prepared to bombard her phone contacts with calls urging them to support him on Sunday when Mexico goes to the polls.
However, Latin America’s second-largest economy is not holding presidential elections – the next is not until 2024. Rather, voters will be offered a simple question in Mexico’s first-ever national election: should President Andres Manuel Lopez Obrador be stripped of his mandate? are you or not?
Lourdes, the ardent Obradista, who regularly posts memes about Lopez Obrador on social media, has no doubt how she will vote on the ballot, which was unusually supported by the president himself.
Lopez Obrador, a 68-year-old populist who took power in 2018, says the referendum is a way to hold the executive accountable to the people and prevent government corruption.
De Lourdes agrees. “Now that he is retiring, future presidents will have to think twice before betraying the people,” she said.
For many years, Mexico was 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 for another six between 2012 and 2018.
Fighting corruption and ensuring transparency were among the key campaign promises of Lopez Obrador, better known as Amlo. But in his three years in office, the international anti-corruption organization Transparency.org has documented only a 3% positive change in levels of corruption.
Amlo’s approval rating fell in a few weeks in February after it was revealed that his son had rented a million-dollar mansion in Houston, owned by a senior figure in an oil company that worked with the Mexican government.
In a recent poll, more than half of Mexico’s electorate said they thought the vote was unnecessary.
But the hardcore Amlovers – as the Mexican president’s fanatical supporters are known – want to be different.
“If we were able to do that [recall a president] before we would have been able to avoid so many tragedies, so many deaths, so many economic failures. We will now have the power to dictate the future of Mexico, us Mexicans – not just the more privileged leadership than before, which felt untouchable, “said Carla Resendez, Amlover of Nuevo Laredo, Tamaulipas, who works as a ranch.
However, Amlo’s mandate had its share of deaths: the president has been repeatedly accused of cavalier response to a pandemic that claimed the lives of some 323,000 Mexicans.
Meanwhile, violence remains at an all-time high, with Mexico reaching a total of 100,000 people missing from the war this year.
But if the latest polls are to be believed, any calls to oust the president this weekend are in vain. Amlo’s approval rating remains high and an estimated 70% of voters will choose to keep him in office.
In order for the vote to be certified, if it is actually called, the turnout must reach 40%. Several other referendums presented to the public in the last two years, including one on possible immunity for former presidents, achieved only 7% turnout.
Although the results of the recall elections are unlikely to come as a surprise, the cost of this procedural vote reached 1.6 billion pesos, approximately $ 80 million – in fact only half of what the government originally requested.
Resendes believes the vote is worth the money, as it could save the country money in the long run. “Before the government saved private banks and put us in a lot of debt. We will now have the opportunity to evaluate the work of the government and prevent this from happening again. “
Support for the president is so fervent that some opposition groups have even called on their supporters to vote “continue” or not vote at all and wait to overthrow Amlo in 2024.
“You’re done [the term], then leave! ” a sign of a rally against Amlo read last week.
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