The municipal administrations that concluded their 2022-2025 period in Veracruz received, in general terms, low ratings from citizens, with insecurity being the main problem inherited by the new local governments, revealed a public opinion study presented by Luis Santoyo Domínguez, director of the firm Santoyo y Asociados.
During the presentation of the results, the specialist explained that the study was applied in the largest and most populated municipalities of the state, with the purpose of obtaining a representative sample of the Veracruz population, since carrying it out in the 212 municipalities would be unfeasible. He highlighted that these cities are strategic not only for local development, but also for state and national growth.
He explained that the methodology used was a stratified random sampling, with between 500 and 800 surveys per municipality, depending on the size of its population. Citizens were asked to rate, on a scale of 1 to 10, the performance of the outgoing municipal administration and identify the main problems that remained pending for the new authorities.
Santoyo Domínguez pointed out that, although some mayors obtained better approval levels than others, the overall balance was not outstanding. In the case of Xalapa, it indicated that the evaluation was intermediate, neither ranking among the best nor among the worst, while Córdoba stood out as one of the municipalities with the worst rating, especially when compared to Orizaba, which has maintained a more constant development in recent years.
The director of the firm stated that this measurement is among the lowest that he has recorded throughout his career in demographic studies, a situation that he attributed to the profile of the candidates nominated by the political parties and the inability of some municipal presidents to form work teams with experience and technical knowledge.
He added that in many town councils it was decided to integrate friends or people without the appropriate profile, which led to inefficient administrations. Added to this, he said, is corruption or misuse of public resources, factors that aggravate government performance and limit municipal development, especially in terms of employment and services.
Regarding the inherited problems, he stressed that insecurity leads citizen concerns in the municipalities evaluated. He considered that the new governments should take these results as a basis for the preparation of their municipal development plans and avoid improvised decisions. Although he recognized the complexity of eradicating this phenomenon, he insisted on the need to design coordinated strategies with state and federal police, given the proximity of municipal bodies to the population.
Regarding the allegations of property damage and financial observations, Santoyo Domínguez stated that many mayors act as if they manage their own resources and not public ones, which reflects practices of incompetence or corruption. In this sense, he called for strengthening citizen evaluation mechanisms and for the State Congress, through the Surveillance Commission, to promote more in-depth reviews of the perception and real performance of municipal governments.
Finally, he maintained that citizen opinion must be a central axis to evaluate municipal presidents and their teams, since it is the inhabitants who directly face the consequences of good or bad administration.
