A 🧵with a quick take as @VP @KamalaHarris heads to #Mexico this evening. From the outset of the Lopez Obrador Administration, the gravest danger lurking over the horizon was always going to be the president’s vision of an imperial presidency and the whittling away of the ...1/8
..checks and balances and autonomous institutions that a generation of Mexicans painstakingly spent more than three decades building to deepen and widen democracy. The president is now doubling down on that threat, revealing a deepening split in #Mexico over the very nature ..2/8
..of its democracy. Regulators (telecoms or energy) and semi and autonomous institutions (the Comptroller General’s Office or the Central bank, National Electoral Institute and National Institute for Access to Information) have all been targeted -tarred and feathered from ...3/8
..the presidential bully pulpit- as mechanisms built to favor elites and the status quo ante, notwithstanding the paradox that many of these institutions paved the way for Lopez Obrador’s electoral victory in 2018. Ahead of yesterday's midterms and the possibility that ...4/8
..his party might actually lose seats (which indeed did happen), the president increasingly seems to have set his sights on curtailing the independence of the Judiciary branch.
During his more than two years in office, the president has sought to weaken #Mexico's ...5/8
During his more than two years in office, the president has sought to weaken #Mexico's ...5/8
..institutions so that they cannot constrain him. But that also means he cannot rely on them to -among other things- generate growth, mitigate the pandemic, resolve social conflicts, tackle insecurity, ensure efficient policymaking, take advantage of #Mexico's geostrategic ..6/8
..assets or even facilitate his eventual exit from office. And the U.S. needs to start paying attention. The Biden Administration, likely hamstrung by the imperious need to secure Mexican support regarding Central American transmigration, has fallen into an "Erdogan Trap";..7/8
..seeking concessions and support in stemming #migrant flows (like the EU did with Turkey), it is turning -one would certainly hope, temporarily- a blind eye to the growing erosion of #Mexico’s democracy and it’s critically important -but still fragile- checks and balances. 8/8
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