López Obrador and the opposition take the electoral fight to the field of prohibited expressions and images

Mexican President Andrés Manuel López Obrador is a political slogan machine. Some of his expressions are easily recognizable in the country, to which he has endowed a meaning that, by force of repetition, has become a collective knowledge. The “power mafia”, one of his best-known concepts, is, according to the president, the factual group made up of business and political potentates to influence government decision-making. The “conservative bloc” is made up mostly of opponents of his administration, among whom there are, of course, many “fifis”, wealthy people who despise “good people.” López Obrador often recite that his electoral victory in 2018, after two failed attempts (in 2006 and 2012), marked the end of “the long neoliberal night” (a period that he places in the last 35 years) and the beginning of the “Fourth transformation” of the country, a concept with which the president stands next to the Mexican revolutions. This ability of the president —the most popular in recent times— to put labels on reality has come into contradiction with recent criteria of the electoral authorities, which have prohibited him from issuing expressions that insult the opposition or that exalt his political project from the very beginning. pulpit of power

López Obrador, who maintains that “with the people everything, without the people nothing”, has fully entered the electoral contest with the purpose of taking his party, Morena, by the hand to win the Presidency and the Congress in next year’s elections. The president leads a morning conference of between two and three hours every day to talk about the most varied topics, with emphasis, lately, on the electoral process and the adversaries of the Broad Front for Mexico, forged by the PAN, the PRI and the PRD. The opposition has resorted to the National Electoral Institute (INE) and the Electoral Tribunal to denounce López Obrador for the references he has made in his morning conference against the Front and his potential candidates. The electoral authorities have granted some demands and validated the argument that the president has violated the principles of impartiality and neutrality that public officials must observe; that he has violated the fairness of the electoral contest, or that he has committed acts of gender political violence.

The prohibitions of the INE and the court have provoked the annoyance of López Obrador, who has made harsh criticism of electoral officials. The most recent clash happened this Monday, when the president questioned a favorable sentence for Senator Xóchitl Gálvez, one of the favorite candidates of the opposition bloc, who denounced the president for making comments about him that could fit into acts of gender violence. “(Their mentions of her) reproduce historical patterns and standards that have always placed women below the interests and strategies of men,” said the legislator. López Obrador denied the accusations, accused the authorities of misrepresenting his words and dedicated half an hour of his conference to explaining his words.

The president has pointed to some examples that, he has maintained, show that he did not say what the authorities say he said. In the morning he projected slides in which, on one side, he placed extracts from the Electoral Tribunal ruling with the sanctionable sayings, and on the other he put the phrases that, according to him, he did express. Example 1 of the sayings of López Obrador, according to the court: “(Gálvez) was chosen by a group of men who have imposed it”; the said López Obrador, according to himself: “It is not like on the right flank, those above have already chosen, Diego (Fernández de Cevallos), (Vicente) Fox, (Carlos) Salinas, etc., and the media have already chosen to Mrs. Xóchitl (as a candidate), that has already been resolved, it was a consultation that was made in the dark to those above, the manager of the conservative bloc, Claudio X. González, and they already imposed Mrs. Xóchitl”. Example 2 of the sayings of López Obrador, according to the court: “They are going to use it to deceive the people”; what the president said, according to himself: “They chose her because they think they are going to cheat with a woman who was born in a town in Hidalgo and who speaks colloquially, directly, she swears.”

Marcelo Ebrard holds a doll that represents López Obrador. Daniel Augusto (CUARTOSCURO)

The president has charged against the magistrates for what he considered a manipulation of their real expressions. “This resolution shows the whole body, exhibits the members of the Electoral Tribunal, because they lie, slander, act falsely, they are capable of even altering my expressions, my words, imagine what kind of judges, arbitrators, you have in this Electoral Tribunal!”, he said. Immediately afterwards, the president has dedicated himself to relaunching his criticism of Gálvez, going over the accusations of gender political violence. “Look at what I supposedly said to judge me as responsible for gender political violence,” he has maintained. “They took away all the essence and also the form, the form above all, which is background.” And the president has also returned to the charge: “Isn’t Mrs. Xóchitl Gálvez Fox? If I’m not lying: the lady is Fox. Of course, in political terms, ”he said.

López Obrador has affirmed that in order not to be credited with more sanctions, he will no longer call Gálvez by her name, and instead he valued referring to her as “madam” or “person”. The regulation imposed on politicians in terms of language, of what they can express and when they can do it, is an elusive matter that provokes constant confrontations. And it also poses a challenge to the authorities, who must be attentive to the strategies of politicians to reverse the prohibitions. Recently, the president created a new section of his morning, entitled “I didn’t say it,” to be able to make political and electoral comments, according to him, in the words of others. Another exemplary case occurred in the framework of the 2018 elections, when the court prohibited Morena candidates from referring to the name of López Obrador during the electoral ban period. Faced with the restrictions, politicians began to use the phrase “you know who” to refer to the leftist leader without mentioning his name. With this formula they were able to anchor themselves to López Obrador for a time without incurring in violations, until the authorities concluded last June that this phrase unequivocally alluded to the person of the leader.

The swing of the prohibitions

The regulation of the land of language and symbols have also led to resolutions that have been criticized as excessive. Recently, as a result of complaints promoted by the opposition, the Electoral Tribunal has prohibited the sale of stuffed dolls of López Obrador in campaign events of the candidates for any position in 2024. The authority has considered that the allusion to the figure of the president benefits the applicants and that these goods must be accounted for as pre-campaign or campaign expenses. This decision is relevant because if an applicant exceeds the set spending limit, he may lose the right to register his candidacy and be disqualified from participating in the elections.

Luis Miguel Carriedo, a specialist in electoral affairs, affirms that the power of the electoral authorities to regulate political messages and the speech of officials arose from the political reform of 2007, after elections in which a strong media campaign was documented and businessmen against López Obrador (then the presidential candidate was dully described as being “a danger to Mexico”). The new model of political communication prohibited the purchase of space on radio and television, advance campaigns and the personalized promotion of officials in government messages. Since then, denigration or slander of politicians has been prohibited in electoral advertisements. Carriedo points out that, although basic elements have been established in the law, the sanctionable expressions are variable and are highly subject to pressure from the parties and interpretation by the authorities.

“I believe that the problem is not so much the rules, but the consistency of the criteria in the actions of the electoral authorities and also in the strategies of the parties,” he said in an interview. “All these criteria have been making electoral regulation very cumbersome. The substance of the 2007 reform, which was to prevent powers that be from determining who had the right to appear in the media, or governments from improperly meddling with public resources, or someone promoting themselves to affect adversaries, was It has become, already in its application, a regulation and criteria that make arbitration in matters of elections very complicated”, adds the specialist.

López Obrador has argued that the job of a political leader is to do pedagogy. In that role, the president has not only shaped the set of concepts on which he maintains that movement and that describe his vision of his world. He has also said that he wants to create a “dictionary” of terms that belong to the syntax of neoliberalism and whose function is to cover up reality or confuse the people. According to López Obrador, contemporary image consultants often recommend that politicians who are their clients adopt these expressions. In several of his conferences, the president has criticized the term resilience to refer to the ability of territories to adapt to changes; or the use of the word empathy instead of sympathy, or holistic instead of integral, he has even questioned the concept of climate change. Recently, the president also criticized the term sorority, alluding to solidarity among women in feminist theory. López Obrador tried to pronounce the word several times before getting it right: he said “soloridad” and “sonoridad”. “Imagine, I can’t say it,” he explained.

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