Next Sunday, April 10, the mandate revocation consultation will be held in Mexico, a referendum promoted by President Andrés Manuel López Obrador for the country’s electorate – in Mexico and abroad – to decide whether they want their government to remain in power. .
The revocation of the mandate will be considered valid if at least 40% of the people registered in the nominal list of voters participate. Until March 18, the nominal list consisted of more than 93 million Mexicans, according to data from the National Electoral Institute of Mexico (INE), for which more than 37 million votes would be needed in favor of revocation.
On the need for a 40% stake, López Obrador said at the end of 2021 that “even if I don’t reach 40 and lose, that is, if people say I’m leaving, I’m leaving. Why? Because you cannot govern without the support, without the support of the people, and even less when a transformation is taking place. If I don’t have the support of the people, I can’t do anything. (…) A strong government, not authoritarian, but strong because of its popular support, can make great changes.”
How did we get here?
In March 2019, López Obrador signed a letter addressed to the Mexican people in which he established that a consultation would be held in 2021 to ask citizens whether or not to continue with his term or resign.
“I was certainly elected to exercise the presidency for a period of six years, but, as the Magna Carta shows, the people have the right to change the form of their government at any time, that is, the people put and the people take away. ”, wrote Lopez. However, INE temporarily suspended the mandate revocation consultation due to lack of budget at the end of 2021.
Strictly speaking, the consultation for revocation of mandate is an instrument of citizen participation that was published by the Executive in the Official Gazette of the Federation on September 14, 2021 – prior approval by the Chamber of Deputies and the Senate of the Republic in the same assembly -, and that was requested by a segment of the Mexican population to determine the early conclusion in the performance of the President of Mexico, based on the loss of confidence.
In addition, it is a measure promoted by the President of Mexico and included in the Mexican Constitution in December 2019. “Today it is important to remember that the revocation of a mandate, according to article 35 of the Constitution, is a right of citizenship and not a prerogative of the ruler or political parties”, said the chief adviser of INE, Lorenzo Córdova, during an extraordinary session of the General Council of the institution in February.
López Obrador said it was a “peaceful, legal and legitimate” way to resolve differences. “I am interested in the democratic process, in the fact that we leave this democratic method established and that it becomes a habit,” said López Obrador during a press conference held this Friday (8) in the central state of Tlaxcala.
In turn, historian and political analyst José Antonio Crespo told CNN on the April 10 consultation that “the revocation of the mandate makes no sense, nobody wants him to leave, only a few”.
“We could save a lot of money. However, they insist on doing this because it is really a campaign for their image, to highlight their image again, to recover the political capital that they have lost to some extent and try to transfer it to their candidate or candidate already when the presidential elections arrive. in 2024”, added Crespo.
“I believe that the worst thing that can happen politically to López Obrador is that he loses his party in 2024, because everything he said about his historic project would fall apart, about a peaceful revolution that, according to him, he is carrying out, because it would be ‘hey , went so wrong, that in the first change the city toppled”, he concluded.
INE has a budget of just over US$ 78.2 million (about R$ 373 million) to organize the call for the vote to revoke the mandate. The initial cost was just over US$ 191.2 million (R$ 912 million), according to INE data.
The electoral institution said on Tuesday (5) in a statement that it had approved the installation of just over 57,500 polling stations across Mexico for the consultation that will take place on April 10. According to INE, there will be enough ballots for Mexicans registered on the nominal list to participate in this exercise.
Source: CNN Brasil
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