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La izquierda populista en México: ¿Amenaza o correctivo para la democracia?
Abstract
En el libro La Salida, de cara a la elección presidencial de 2018, Andrés Manuel López Obrador (AMLO) presentó el diagnostico de la situación del país y las propuestas de solución que darían forman a su campaña electoral. En este libro, AMLO señaló que los gobernantes no eran más que una “pandilla de saqueadores” y se comprometió a reemplazar la “república simulada” con “un orden político nuevo, democrático, promotor de la legalidad, humanista y con el distintivo de la honestidad” (López Obrador, 2017: 13). Este planteamiento tiene un énfasis claramente populista: la captura del poder por parte de una élite corrupta. Sin embargo, conociendo la realidad mexicana a finales del sexenio de Peña Nieto, ¿qué tanto se podía estar en desacuerdo con tal diagnóstico? ¿Qué tanto se podía cuestionar esa solución? El veredicto de las urnas fue inequívoco: el 53% de la votación efectiva, equivalentes a poco más de 30 millones de sufragios, se pronunció favor del “cambio verdadero” y la “cuarta transformación” del país.
En este trabajo se analiza el componente populista del discurso de la izquierda mexicana contemporánea. Esto implica, primordialmente, enfocarse en el movimiento político de López Obrador. Desde un principio vale decir que no es la intención hacer un elogio incondicional de AMLO, de la misma manera que tampoco pretende hacer una encendida diatriba en su contra. El propósito es contribuir al estudio del populismo en México, analizando sus características, su relación con la izquierda y sus implicaciones para la democracia. El argumento es que la corrupción y la ineficacia de los gobiernos han provocado un descontento generalizado que la izquierda populista ha sabido capitalizar política y electoralmente. El discurso populista culpa de los males del país a la “mafia del poder” y ofrece un “proyecto alternativo de nación”, en el que la honestidad y la austeridad republicana son el sustrato de un modelo de desarrollo promovido por el Estado. Sin embargo, esta izquierda es una opción basada en un programa ideológico limitado, sostenido por un partido personalista. Al igual que su concepción del antagonismo entre el pueblo y las élites, las soluciones que ofrece a los problemas públicos son simples y esquemáticas, más cercanas a la ocurrencia que a la política pública. Fundamentalmente, la supremacía moral que le confiere a la voluntad del pueblo supone una permanente tensión con la legalidad, un modelo plebiscitario de relación con la ciudadanía, y poco espacio para la reivindicación de derechos y la diversidad. Si se mantiene fiel a una estrategia populista de representación y movilización política, como se argumenta en la parte final de este texto, es difícil que esta expresión de la izquierda pueda contribuir al fortalecimiento de la democracia mexicana.
... Morena, y antes los cuadros que militaron en el Partido de la Revolución Democrática (PRD), han tenido una amplia participación en el gobierno . La misma identidad de Morena y de su líder como un partido o movimiento guiado por una agenda de izquierda ha sido cuestionada en varias ocasiones (Monsiváis, 2020). ...
... Ahora bien, aunque la autocratización erosiona la democracia, no necesariamente provoca una ruptura del régimen ni desemboca en el autoritarismo (Bermeo, 2016; Del Tronco y Monsiváis, 2020;Jee et al., 2019). El declive democrático observado en Estados Unidos de América, durante la administración de Donald Trump (2016, al igual que la registrada en Brasil desde el desafuero de Dilma Rousseff y la posterior elección de Jair Bolsonaro (2016 a la fecha), son casos ilustrativos de deslizamiento en reversa que no se han convertido en autoritarismos. ...
... A diferencia del populismo desarrollista que caracterizó al gobierno de Lázaro Cárdenas (1932-1938 (Córdova, 1974), el populismo de López Obrador es un híbrido de la política económica y la política social distribucionista de los sexenios previos, con recetas retóricas neopopulistas de deslegitimación de las instituciones y actores políticos, sin los componentes desarrollistas y modernizadores de las experiencias cardenista y echeverrista. El populismo de López Obrador ha sido abordado ampliamente (Monsiváis, 2020;Cansino y Covarrubias, 2007;Pérez Verduzco, 2019;Castro, Ley y Beltrán, 2020;Ramírez, 2020). Difiere en tres aspectos fundamentales del cardenismo: en primer lugar, no se sostiene en un movimiento social o clasista identificable, sino en una heterogénea base electoral que en el pasado reciente ha mostrado la volatilidad de sus preferencias y su dispersión ideológica. ...
https://www.dropbox.com/s/c2q8hz43mx1lvs3/la%204t%20y%20el%20reg
The so-called Fourth Transformation (4T) in
Mexico has been one of the political-social movements with
the greatest civic-legal legitimacy and citizen participation.
The objective was to document whether this government
model (2019-2024) presents neo-populist characteristics;
that is, if the change has been real or has only been a political-
media-electoral strategy. Information was consulted in
more than 90 information sources such as the National
Development Plan (PND) (2019-2024), books, articles
in indexed and popular magazines, national circulation
newspapers, as well as government information through
the daily conference every morning of the President of the
Republic. The data consultation was within the first three
years of government (2019, 2020 and 2021). The essay will be
presented based on official data and verifiable information
in the public and academic domain, therefore, it is not
your desire to demonstrate or insult political affinities or
adversities, but to invite reflection and discussion based on
hard data and reliable sources. The 4T was a democratic way
out of the exhaustion of previous administrations, on related
issues such as corruption, economy, growth, and security.
However, halfway through the six-year term, it continues to
present the same shortcomings, deficiencies, and schemes
of the predecessor governments; with the characteristic
of having a predilection for the most unprotected social
sectors, called the people, and an animation for the middle
and business class, which creates social, economic and
productive distancing that limits achieving the “well-being”
that this administration hoists as a government slogan.
Leaders can modify individual behavior. The government has many options to protect citizens in the middle of a crisis. One significant effort is to communicate to the people the actions to be taken as straightforwardly as possible. The Mexican President, Andrés Manuel López Obrador (AMLO), is heading a leftist government. Since day one in office, he offers daily morning press conferences because he wants to have a dialogue between the President and society. He has been communicating the essential policies and actions regarding the Covid-19 pandemic under this unique format of political communication.
The interests of this research are focused on determining, at first, that populism is an ideology that can be identified in discourses. Whenever there is a crisis, a leader’s words have a significant weight on people’s actions. Second, discussing populism as a discourse refers to a specific speaker’s set of ideas that are present in speeches. These ideas can reflect the hidden intentions and values of the ruler that are translated into specific policies. Choosing one policy over another as a consequence of following a specific ideology can produce divergent results in society. That is why populism needs to be studied from the lens of discourse as a way of deploying power through language.
Political discourse is characterized by being argumentative, strategic, and performative. Given these elements, it is likely that the discursive strategies of the Mexican President can show ideological elements. After selecting five important speeches of AMLO’s morning conferences, this research wants to find the populist ideological elements present in López Obrador’s discourse regarding the Covid-19 pandemic in Mexico.
When referring to identifying the ideological elements present in AMLO’s discourse, this thesis relies on Thompson’s (1998) operational definition that describes how ideologies can act and be identified in a discourse. His proposal distinguishes five general modes through which ideology operates: legitimization, fragmentation, unification, simulation, and objectivization. Each of these is identifiable through different discursive strategies.
With the objective to find the populist elements, this thesis performs a critical discourse analysis from a qualitative perspective. The research finds that these five AMLO’s speeches have discursive elements in each of Thompson’s categories. For example, he divides the society into two clear parts, the “good ones” represented by him and his government, and his “enemies” represented by a corrupt group of wealthy and conservative elite that used to benefit from previous governments.
AMLO uses Mexican history and a nationalist feeling to create unification among the “good people” supporting his government. Besides, AMLO’s discourse is based on his charisma by using colloquial language. Promoting a cult to his personality gives him the stamina needed to keep ruling the country after getting infected by Covid-19. With several quotations extracted from his speeches, this thesis finds enough elements to argue that the Mexican President has been promoting a populist discourse to communicate his government's actions regarding the pandemic health crisis.
ABSTRACT
In the 2018 presidential election in Mexico, a left-wing party came to power for the first time since the beginning of the democratic transition, with the victory of the candidate of the electoral coalition Together We Will Make History, Andrés Manuel López Obrador (AMLO). The president named his leftist political project, which is currently in the works, the Fourth Transformation. In this context, this article aims to describe the eventual discourses of the Fourth Transformation under the Gramscian categories of the national-popular, the modern Prince, wars of position, and hegemony. In this argumentative line, AMLO's political-partisan itinerary is described, the political relevance of his MORENA political party, the anti-populist discourse of opposition intellectuals, and the discourses aligned with the national-popular in terms of foreign policy and the state thing. Carrying out this overview that accounts for the national-popular aspect of the Fourth Transformation, a qualitative methodology was used to interpret the meaning of presidential speeches, books published by President Andrés Manuel López Obrador, party's documents, electoral platforms, and journalistic notes. We conclude that the discursive matrix of the Fourth Transformation establishes conditions of possibility for the constitution of a national-popular hegemonic political project in Mexico.
El llamado giro a la izquierda, en la primera década del siglo XXI en el orbelatinoamericano, reconfiguró los discursos populistas en el mapa político deesta región. México llegó tarde a la ola populista de izquierda, pues esta se dahasta el ascenso democrático del partido MORENA y su líder Andrés ManuelLópez Obrador, quien llega al poder en el 2018 en un contexto en el que laderecha se consolida en Latinoamérica. A partir de un análisis de los discursosdel presidente de México, Andrés Manuel López Obrador, en el período 2018-2020, observamos las condiciones de posibilidad de la construcción de undiscurso nacional-popular, que pretende articular de forma hegemónica, unanueva forma de hacer política con un discurso de rechazo y crítica de la «élitepolítica corrupta» y de la ideología neoliberal en México. Teniendo como marcode referencia los conceptos de lo «nacional-popular» de Gramsci (1999), y de Portantiero y De Ípola (1981) y el «discurso populista» de Laclau (2010), pre-sentamos un primer avance de nuestra investigación, señalando que lo nacio-nal-popular es el rasgo distintivo del discurso populista del presidente deMéxico, a través del cual configura su proyecto político llamado por él mismo«la Cuarta Transformación de México»
The so-called left turn, in the first decade of the 21st century in the Latin American area, restructured the populist discourses in the political map of this region. Mexico arrived late to the left-wing populist wave, since it happened until the democratic rise of the political party MORENA and its leader Andrés Manuel López Obrador, who takes office in 2018 in a context where the right is strengthening in Latin America. From an analysis of the discourses of the President of Mexico, Andrés Manuel López Obrador, in the period 2018-2020, we observe the conditions of possibility of the construction of a popular-national discourse, which seeks to articulate, in an hegemonic way, a new way to make politics with his discourse of rejection and criticism of the «corrupt political elite» and the neoliberal ideology in Mexico. Taking as a frame of reference the concepts of the “national-popular” of Gramsci (1986), and Portantiero and De Ípola (1981) and the “populist discourse” of Laclau (2010), we present a first advance of our research, pointing out that the national-popular is the distinctive feature of the populist discourse of the President of Mexico, through which he configures his political project named by himself “the Fourth Transformation of Mexico”.
The so-called left turn, in the first decade of the 21st century in the Latin American area, restructured the populist discourses in the political map of this region. Mexico arrived late to the left-wing populist wave, since it happened until the democratic rise of the political party MORENA and its leader Andrés Manuel López Obrador, who takes office in 2018 in a context where the right is strengthening in Latin America. From an analysis of the discourses of the President of Mexico, Andrés Manuel López Obrador, in the period 2018-2020, we observe the conditions of possibility of the construction of a popular-national discourse, which seeks to articulate, in an hegemonic way, a new way to make politics with his discourse of rejection and criticism of the «corrupt political elite» and the neoliberal ideology in Mexico. Taking as a frame of reference the concepts of the “national-popular” of Gramsci (1986), and Portantiero and De Ípola (1981) and the “populist discourse” of Laclau (2010), we present a first advance of our research, pointing out that the national-popular is the distinctive feature of the populist discourse of the President of Mexico, through which he configures his political project named by himself “the Fourth Transformation of Mexico”.
Estudio teórico y metodológico para enmarcar la obra desde el punto de vista teórico, de la literatura y de la metodología
Conclusiones de la obra, análisis de los principales hallazgos procedentes de los diferentes casos de estudio
Análisis de las ideas de política exterior del Movimento Cinque Stelle en Italia desde sus comienzos, los años en la oposición (2013-2018) y la experiencia en el gobierno de Italia (2018-actualidad)
This article analyzes the development of Self-defense Groups in Michoacán between February 2013 and March 2014. The paper discusses the changes of Self-defense Groups: conversion in social movement, factionalism games, Mafia aspects, violence cycles or possible brokerage games that stimulate civilization cycles in the state of Michoacán. This essay draws attention to the relative lack of studies on the issue and suggests lines of research on the subject, which may be undertaken.
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The political institutions under which we live today evolved from a revolutionary idea that shook the world in the second part of the eighteenth century: that a people should govern itself. Yet if we judge contemporary democracies by the ideals of self-government, equality and liberty, we find that democracy is not what it was dreamt to be. This book addresses central issues in democratic theory by analyzing the sources of widespread dissatisfaction with democracies around the world. With attention throughout to historical and cross-national variations, the focus is on the generic limits of democracy in promoting equality, effective participation, control of governments by citizens, and liberty. The conclusion is that although some of this dissatisfaction has good reasons, some is based on an erroneous understanding of how democracy functions. Hence, although the analysis identifies the limits of democracy, it also points to directions for feasible reforms.