President López Obrador’s sixth report was like reaching the top of a roller coaster ride. What is coming is a descent month, in full swing, with unexpected changes, with many screams, fears and fates, with a peaceful landing on October 1st.
The president is happy. With a constitutional majority in the Union Congress you have one month to do whatever you want. What you haven’t been able to do for almost six years, you now have a whole month. How many renovations can be done in a month? It is a matter of wish that what the President wants is fulfilled. The problem lies with Claudia Sheinbaum, who must face the consequences of every reform and every presidential decision.
It is still uncomfortable and at the same time symbolic that the president of the most chilango and most Unamite cabinet in history (we have never had so many secretaries from Mexico City and so many Sheinbaum appointees from UNAM) facing the student movement. That it was born in UNAM and spread to various private universities.
The only real opposition today is the students on the streets and especially the students of UNAM. Claudia Sheinbaum comes from the 1986 student movement at UNAM, CEU, and knows all too well what it means politically for students to take to the streets. He can’t ignore them, but he can’t stand in front of the 4T’s roller coaster car, with crazy descents and the president in the front seat.
It’s still significant that the president-elect decided to take a three-day vacation just as Congress was about to approve judicial reform. Apart from the fact that he has to distance himself from the President, who leaves him neither sun nor shade, it is clear that he does not want to be at the moment when the judicial reform is approved, because he does not agree in general, but so as not to stand for a reform whose content Essentially Lopez Obrador’s personal vendetta.
Will September become the month of students, especially from UNAM, on the streets? This will mainly depend on two factors. The first is that the movement against judicial reform tends to draw attention beyond law schools. What we saw yesterday in the Angel of Freedom was not minor, although it is not a concern for the government. The second, and arguably more politically subtle, protest against the reform coincided with the tenth anniversary of the disappearance of the 43 students from Ayotzinapa. If the two movements meet on the streets later this month, Shinbaum will begin a six-year term on Oct. 1 in the middle of a perfect storm.
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