Lilly Tellez and President’s Happiness | Article

Antonio Salgado Borge

Andrés Manuel López Obrador, with a smile from ear to ear, pointed out the possibility of Lili Telles becoming the opposition’s presidential candidate in 2024. Her happiness is well founded. It is difficult to find a more promising electoral scenario for the president’s party.

With a far-right sword in one hand and a populist shield in the other, Lily Telles has managed to top almost every serious poll that evaluates the approval of possible PAN candidates. He is closely watched by Santiago Creel, the archetypal PAN politician of this century. In the current scenario, if there were no internal rules that put him at a disadvantage, Tellez would come close to eating PAN and therefore PRI and PRD, the cars that the PAN locomotive would pull.

The fact that a buffoonish, populist and far-right individual ends up eating the mainstream Mexican right-wing party through and through is neither new nor surprising. The same thing happened in the United States with Donald Trump or in Italy with Matteo Salvini. In any case, it is surprising that in Mexico it happened so late.

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Referring to this experience, one might argue that AMLO’s ridicule reflects an excess of self-confidence. Finally, many of the same far-right buffoons who had colonized his party in other parts of the world were reaching out for the presidential election.

However, it seems to me that AMLO has two good reasons to view Lily Tellez’s rise as a red herring.

The first reason is the close connection of his speech with right-wing populism. In 2024, the opposition has little to offer. We are literally looking at the same group of people who have ruled the country and various states for decades; that is, in front of the same politicians who were rejected in 2018 and who, by all polls, continue to be widely rejected (until they moved to Morena).

But we are not only facing the same discredited group of people. We are also in front of the same group of discredited ideas and proposals. The only thing that the opposition alliance then promises is a return to the state that existed before AMLO; income that the population, in general, does not even remotely want.

In this context, the only card the opposition can consistently play in 2024 is to say that despite its corruption, terrible administration, and lack of a project, voting for it is a vote for liberalism or against populism that destroys democracies.

Or, to put it another way, the best, if not the only, trump card available to the opposition today is to present the public with the following dilemma: if you want the institutions that support liberal democracy to survive, vote for us; If you want them to keep breaking down, go ahead and vote for the president’s party.

But this possibility is instantly removed from consideration when the candidacy of the opposition president is taken by a right-wing populist. And the fact is that for those who fall into this category, anti-liberal discourse is also characteristic. It is no coincidence that its main model is the anti-democratic and anti-right Hungary of Viktor Orban.

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None of Morena’s choices will stand out as anti-liberal when she’s standing next to Lily Tellez. Thus, the eventual candidacy of this policy would remove any electoral risk of the possibility that Morena’s candidate will saddle a populist horse and try to repeat the use of the formula used by AMLO (which, sincerely, I hope, is not the case).

In Lily Telles’s defense, one might reply that AMLO fertilized and sowed a populist conspiracy and that while Morena’s two most likely candidates did not have the personal conditions to reap what was sown, this candidate could.

But this should be answered that Lily Telles was late for this race and came unsuccessfully. AMLO has successfully occupied the narrative, media and structural space of populism in Mexico. The President meets almost all the elements that characterize modern populism, and although he will not be a candidate, many people will vote for him again through Morena in 2024.

In this context, the only means of right-wing populism available to Lily Tellez would be to sound the alarm of communism. If Telles is the nominee, we will likely hear this speech dozens of times. The problem for the opposition is that at the moment no one in their right mind believes that Mexico can become “communist” (as far as I know, only sympathizers of the far-right FRENAAA movement raise this; although it is frankly doubtful that they understand the meaning of this term).

We have seen that the weight of the shield of right-wing populism can sink the opposition and Lily Telles. We need to rethink the effectiveness of his predictable use of the far-right sword.

To begin with, the main characteristic of the extreme right and its populist representatives is their anti-Wokist banner. The term “awakened”, which means “awake” in Spanish, is used to refer to a vision that puts social justice first and is especially associated with a progressive and liberal approach. For example, some have woken up rejecting oppressive and supposedly natural traditional social orders, celebrating gender diversity, opposing any form of racial discrimination, supporting feminism, and raising concerns about the climate crisis.

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Ironically, a number of right-wingers take the term “woke up” as an insult. What is significant for the purposes of this analysis is that for some right-wing parties and politicians, the strategy of demonizing Voqism has been relatively successful, and this kind of crusade is now part of the discursive deck, such as the two main US presidential candidates or the Vox party in Spain.

Unfortunately for Lily Telles, and for several progressive and liberal people in Mexico, neither Morena nor AMLO meet the necessary conditions to be considered awake. At best, the president and his party have preferred to operate in an environment of uncertainty and uncertainty when it comes to adherence to progressive principles. Consequently, what should have been one of the main tools of the far right was canceled from the very beginning.

To this it must be added that even if this were not the case, anti-Wokismo is clearly not enough. In countries such as Spain, this type of discourse has generated close to 10% votes at best, and while in the United States wokism specter intimidation has been successful for those seeking the Republican candidacy, it is unlikely to be effective in the open. elections. Moreover, it can be argued that, especially in a young market, which is clearly the most liberal and progressive, this strategy can be counterproductive.

Lily Telles is currently the opposition’s most valuable pre-candidate. His personality and speech stand out in a group dominated by policies and ideas that the Mexican populace explicitly rejects.

But it can always be worse. If she were the opposition candidate in 2024, Lily Telles would stand before her, holding on to a populist shield with one hand and the sword of the far right with the other. None of these tools stand a real chance of succeeding in next year’s elections; on the contrary, both are heavy ballast that will further sink what is left of the right in Mexico.

It is easy to understand why the President is celebrating and smiling.