“Rachitic voting, vice of origin and unnecessary waste”: the revocation of the mandate according to the PAN

Andrés Manuel López Obrador, president of Mexico, celebrated this Monday, April 11, that he managed to mobilize 15 million supporters with the consultation of the Revocation of Mandate, despite the fact that citizen participation did not reach 20% and was therefore not binding.

In his morning conference from the National Palace, the president called Sunday's exercise a “complete success” and assured that it was a historic and unprecedented event for the country. “For the first time, citizens were consulted to decide on the president's government.”

With almost 100% counted, the National Electoral Institute (INE) recorded a citizen participation of 17.72% and 16.46 million votes. Of these, just over 15.1 million (91.9%) voted for López Obrador to remain in office until 2024, compared to 1.06 million (6.46%) who voted in favor of the revocation and some 280,000 who cast invalid votes.

Vice of origin

Jorge Triana Tena, federal deputy of the National Action Party (PAN), considered that the only use that the day of the Mandate Revocation had was to measure the true electoral strength of López Obrador, since it otherwise implied a “ricket vote” and an unnecessary waste of millions of pesos.

“People who disagree with the government did not demonstrate at the polls. It was a consultation whose activation mechanism was in charge of Morena's structure and not by the people who want it to leave. There is already a vice of origin from the start. It was not useful either because there was a rickets vote, about 15% or 17% of the nominal list. It was not useful because about 1,500 million pesos were spent,” said the deputy to Infobae Mexico.

The Vice-Coordinator of the PAN Parliamentary Group reiterated that the exercise only served to measure the mobilization strength of the president's supporters. “We already know what size it is. It is 14 or 15 million people, compared to 31 million in 2018. It served to undress the true size of this structure. There is not much to celebrate and there is much to regret, because millions of pesos were thrown away in an exercise that left us nothing.”

The panist assured that the initial intention of the revocation of mandate consultation, proposed in 2019 by the president, was to pave the way for re-election. However, he completely ruled out the possibility that Sunday's results would give rise to such a scenario.

“I think he is dying to win from re-election, but fortunately the citizenship in 2021 set foot on him, turned his back on him and did not vote in the direction he expected. He did not vote to give him a qualified majority that would allow him to change the constitution and be able to pave this path to re-election. At least by the peaceful route, it will take a lot of trouble for him to reelect himself. By legal means it is impossible because it does not have the votes in the Chamber of Deputies to make these constitutional changes.”

The usefulness of not voting

The exercise of the revocation of the mandate, as it was carried out for the first time in Mexico, always favors those who are in power and leave the citizen who activates this mechanism completely defenseless,” said Triana Tena.

“We have to look for another model. It would seem more fair to me for us to make the figure of impeachment more flexible or give another form to the figure of impeachment, so that organized citizens could ask that in the face of a serious fault of the president, he could be tried in Congress or in the Senate with some other mechanism,” he explained.

Although initially it seemed logical that the Mandate Revocation was the great opportunity for opponents to end the public policies they have criticized so much, the Conservative Party MP considered it beneficial and useful not to participate in Sunday's consultation.

“I think participating in this exercise, to a greater extent, would have yielded more dividends to the president. His narrative of going out to say that he called for the revocation and the people responded immediately, voting one way or the other, I think it would have been completely detrimental to him. The best thing was not to participate in order to accurately measure the size of the electoral base and to undress the true size of this structure,” he concluded.

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