Analysts on Monday said that Mexican President Andres Manuel Lopez Obrador’s successful push to hold a recall vote at the weekend could, paradoxically, leave the nation’s democracy weaker.
Lopez Obrador declared Sunday’s referendum, in which he was strongly supported by the few Mexicans voters who participated, as “a complete success” and “a historic event.”
He described the vote as a victory for “participative democracy,” adding that Mexicans had never before been allowed to vote on whether a president should be recalled from office.
Photo: AFP
However, his Morena party used illegal, old-style electioneering tactics for what was a largely symbolic vote, analysts said.
Lopez Obrador was never in doubt of losing the referendum, with his approval rating hovering at about 60 percent. Near-final vote tallies on Monday showed that about 92 percent of the ballots cast said he should remain in office.
Still, the president saw getting large numbers of voters to turn out was the real measure of his political movement. Turnout was about 16.5 million, or only about 18 percent of eligible voters — far below the 40 percent turnout needed to make the vote binding.
The leader of Lopez Obrador’s party, Mario Delgado, boasted about driving around in a van, picking up people to take them to polling stations, a practice that is illegal in Mexico.
Delgado posted photographs on his social media accounts showing him driving a van painted with the words “Do you want to vote? I’ll take you there.”
The van was later shown loaded with people who had voted.
Economist Clara Jusidman said that some government employees were also required to take a minimum number of people to polling stations. That is a practice reminiscent of the old Institutional Revolutionary Party, which governed Mexico for seven decades without interruption until it lost the 2000 elections.
“A lot of rules were broken that had been established to protect against government intervention, the use of public funds to promote [a vote] and ‘client’ politics,” Jusidman said, referring to people who feel they have to vote to preserve their government benefits.
The president has criticized elements of the electoral system that emerged after decades of near one-party rule in an effort to strengthen democracy, among them independent electoral authorities established in the late 1990s to ensure fair play and equity in elections.
Lopez Obrador has pledged to overhaul the National Electoral Institute, contending that it is too expensive and is hostile to his Morena party.
Critics said Sunday’s vote was the real waste of money.
They said it cost almost US$80 million and was just a way for Lopez Obrador to rally his base midway through the single term allowed Mexican presidents. They worry that changes to the electoral institute are likely to decrease its autonomy and independence.
Lopez Obrador has expressed a dislike for independent regulatory and oversight bodies in general, such as in government transparency and information access. He has sought to eliminate some of them.
Luis Miguel Perez Juarez, an expert in democratic transitions at the Monterrey Technological Institute, said the president has never had much affection for the electoral institute, known by its initials INE, which occasionally tries to limit what elected officials can say in the buildup to elections.
“Ever since he came to power, the INE has bothered him,” Perez Juarez said.
With much pomp and circumstance, Cairo is today to inaugurate the long-awaited Grand Egyptian Museum (GEM), widely presented as the crowning jewel on authorities’ efforts to overhaul the country’s vital tourism industry. With a panoramic view of the Giza pyramids plateau, the museum houses thousands of artifacts spanning more than 5,000 years of Egyptian antiquity at a whopping cost of more than US$1 billion. More than two decades in the making, the ultra-modern museum anticipates 5 million visitors annually, with never-before-seen relics on display. In the run-up to the grand opening, Egyptian media and official statements have hailed the “historic moment,” describing the
‘CHILD PORNOGRAPHY’: The doll on Shein’s Web site measure about 80cm in height, and it was holding a teddy bear in a photo published by a daily newspaper France’s anti-fraud unit on Saturday said it had reported Asian e-commerce giant Shein (希音) for selling what it described as “sex dolls with a childlike appearance.” The French Directorate General for Competition, Consumer Affairs and Fraud Control (DGCCRF) said in a statement that the “description and categorization” of the items on Shein’s Web site “make it difficult to doubt the child pornography nature of the content.” Shortly after the statement, Shein announced that the dolls in question had been withdrawn from its platform and that it had launched an internal inquiry. On its Web site, Le Parisien daily published a
China’s Shenzhou-20 crewed spacecraft has delayed its return mission to Earth after the vessel was possibly hit by tiny bits of space debris, the country’s human spaceflight agency said yesterday, an unusual situation that could disrupt the operation of the country’s space station Tiangong. An impact analysis and risk assessment are underway, the China Manned Space Agency (CMSA) said in a statement, without providing a new schedule for the return mission, which was originally set to land in northern China yesterday. The delay highlights the danger to space travel posed by increasing amounts of debris, such as discarded launch vehicles or vessel
RUBBER STAMP? The latest legislative session was the most productive in the number of bills passed, but critics attributed it to a lack of dissenting voices On their last day at work, Hong Kong’s lawmakers — the first batch chosen under Beijing’s mantra of “patriots administering Hong Kong” — posed for group pictures, celebrating a job well done after four years of opposition-free politics. However, despite their smiles, about one-third of the Legislative Council will not seek another term in next month’s election, with the self-described non-establishment figure Tik Chi-yuen (狄志遠) being among those bowing out. “It used to be that [the legislature] had the benefit of free expression... Now it is more uniform. There are multiple voices, but they are not diverse enough,” Tik said, comparing it
RSS