President Andrés Manuel López Obrador repeated what Ernesto Zedillo said during his public appearance in Mexico. “Representative of the oligarchy,” he called him after his participation in the Actinver company’s economic forum, where the former president attacked populist governments. “They like democracy until it gives them the opportunity to gain power, and once they have access to it, they set themselves the goal of undermining it.” “It is a very serious problem, because the path to democracy leads through deception, demagoguery and populism,” Zedillo explained on Wednesday evening to an audience that responded with applause to his numerous indirect references to the Mexican president.
The lack of answers to the series of questions he asked the former president last Tuesday regarding the PRI's imminent return to Mexico was minimized by the president's assurance that “he had no reason to answer it.” However, he took up much of his morning conference that Thursday to address the issue. “Zedillo has the right to speak out and defend what he thinks, nothing more than that we think differently.” For him, neoliberalism is a viable model, for me it is not. For us, it is neo-Porfirism that protects the minorities who continue to support and recognize it. Surely they were the ones who invited him. How could they not support him when he gave them the nation's wealth and saved them in a crisis? He is a representative of the oligarchy,” the president said.
The former Mexican president's reflections on social support and the receptivity of people to be attracted by the promise of a paradise without effort, “that they are offered that manna will fall from heaven and that they do not make great sacrifices or great efforts “To achieve what we strive for together,” also provoked López Obrador's reaction. “What we have, according to him and many others: it is populism, it is paternalism, because that is what they call what is given to the poor and what is given to those at the top, they call it development or rescue,” López replied. Obrador.
The president also responded to the economist's call to defend democracy in the face of the risks it faces. “When he was president, I maintain that there was no democracy. For democracy is the government of the people and for the people, and he did not rule for the people but for those mentioned above. This is called, according to the Aristotelian definition, oligarchy with a façade of democracy,” López Obrador added. He took the opportunity to recall the Savings Protection Bank Fund (Fobaproa), created during the government of Carlos Salinas de Gortari (1988-1994) but implemented during the Zedillo government, which consolidated the private debts of commercial banks in converted national debt. “A democratic government would not have done what it did, which was to convert the private debt of a few into public debt. Who thinks and acts like that? An oligarch, not a democrat,” the president emphasized.
In this sense, however, López Obrador defended the differences between the two. “It is legitimate that we have these differences, it has to do with democracy, the fact that there is no single thought and it is not about grabbing us with punches, are different ideas, but he has every right, to express himself as we do.” , he said. By the way, he has announced that his next book, due to be published in February, will contain opinions about the former president. During his keynote conference together with the former president of the Spanish government, José María Aznar, Zedillo avoided making direct references to the Tabasco native and his government until the last moment. However, he pointed out in a clear allusion: “Every time a politician who doesn't understand some things wants to insult someone, he calls them neoliberal.”
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