Mexican president continues attacking opposition candidate, despite electoral agency's order to stop

Mexico’s president plowed ahead with attacks against the opposition front-runner for the 2024 presidential elections despite a ruling by electoral authorities that he had violated equity and neutrality rules

Mexico President Campaigning (Copyright 2023 The Associated Press. All rights reserved)

Mexico’s president plowed ahead with attacks against the opposition front-runner for the 2024 presidential elections Friday, despite a ruling by electoral authorities that he has been violating equity and neutrality rules with such comments.

President Andrés Manuel López Obrador has spent weeks using his morning press briefing to criticize Xóchitl Gálvez, a plain-talking senator and former indigenous affairs official. López Obrador is barred from running again after the end of his six-year term, and Gálvez hasn’t been nominated yet by opposition parties, but she has been gaining momentum.

The complaints commission of the National Electoral Institute ruled late Thursday that López Obrador's remarks “apparently violated the principles of equity, neutrality impartiality,” and ordered the president to “avoid commenting on electoral matters.”

López Obrador claimed Friday that electoral authorities "are trying to silence me" and violate his freedom of expression. He argued that — because his office had not been formally notified of the ruling — he could continue criticizing Gálvez.

“We still have time, before they want to limit me,” López Obrador said, before repeating claims that Gálvez was “the representative of the mafia of power” and that her company had received tens of millions in government contracts.

Gálvez has responded that even López Obrador's own administration has hired her information technology company to do government work, showing how good the firm is.

“My career didn't start in politics,” Gálvez wrote in her Twitter account. “I am proud to have created jobs for hundreds of Mexican families.”

“The president is upset by tax-paying jobs and businesses, because he has never seen one,” she wrote. “He is used to (getting money) in plain envelopes.”

Gálvez is an independent who serves in the Senate for the conservative National Action Party. She comes from a small-town, partly indigenous background, and has often taken more progressive stances.

After decades in the 20th century in which the former ruling party used government funds to influence elections, Mexico passed strict rules in the late 1990s saying the government had to remain neutral in elections and not use public funds to support or oppose candidates.

Article 134 of the Constitution, which says government media, advertising and public relations must only be used for informative or educational purposes, not for or against any politician. The government pays to produce and broadcast the morning press briefings, held at the lavish National Palace where López Obrador lives.

For several decades, Mexican presidents have avoided — and in recent years, been legally prohibited from — making openly partisan campaign statements. That is in part because Mexico is a highly centralized country where the president wields enormous power, both political and financial.

López Obrador’s behavior could be compared to then-outgoing U.S. President Barack Obama lashing candidate Donald Trump regularly and at length at White House press briefings in 2016, or George W. Bush using such briefings to regularly attack Obama in 2008.

Parties are currently still in primary season, and the official campaigns for the June 2024 presidential elections do not formally start until September

López Obrador has already run afoul of electoral courts on precisely this issue.

Earlier this year, a federal electoral tribunal ruled that López Obrador had violated rules prohibiting the use of government resources in campaigns, related to comments he made during the run-up to two state elections held in Mexico in June.

In March, López Obrador used his morning press briefing to urge Mexicans not to vote for opposition candidates in the two state races, saying “don’t vote for the conservative Alliance … not one vote for the conservatives.”

Gálvez has asked to be allowed to respond to the president’s comments at the daily press briefing, and even got a court injunction allowing her to do so, but López Obrador refused, saying she wanted to “play politics” at the briefing.