The government according to Sheinbaum: elephant recovered, but with storms outside
Year and a half in the National Palace. Claudia Sheinbaum takes stock and her diagnosis is clear: the real mess is not inside, but outside. In her morning conference, the president used an inherited metaphor to describe the State she received.
“The rheumatic elephant that former president Andrés Manuel López Obrador pointed out when entering the government is no longer rheumatic, but there are still many bureaucratic problems within the government.”
He recognizes that the state’s heaviness persists. That there are eternal procedures and grinding gears. But he insists that progress is being made “little by little.” The transformation project, he says, continues.
The real battle is outside
Here comes the dramatic twist. For Sheinbaum, domestic challenges pale in comparison to external ones. It puts the focus away from Reforma.
“I would say, rather, that the challenges we have faced are more external; in our case, the global change caused by the arrival of President Trump to the United States government, with tariffs and a new vision of world trade.”
Translation: Our biggest headache is called Donald Trump. Its aggressive trade policy and tariffs are a wall against which the Mexican economy crashes every day.
Add to that another factor: geopolitics. He mentions the skyrocketing price of oil due to conflicts in the Middle East. They are global storms that hit from outside.
Faced with this panorama, his bulwark is the Plan Mexico and what he calls the “strength” of the national economy. It is his argument that, despite the international gale, the ship holds.
The narrative is served. The message to citizens is this: we have cured the government’s lame elephant, but now we have to navigate an ocean troubled by forces beyond our control. Political theater changes scene.
