Spain and Mexico are more than a president

A country's progress is not achieved by fomenting hatred or resentment, nor by raising historical corpses, nor by erecting walls and rolling up the national flag.

The late-populist formula used by Andrés Manuel López Obrador should not even have a place in the construction of modern societies that are much more democratic and egalitarian as they are intended to be in the 21st century.

With a view to 2030, what should be analysed is not a president spouting nonsensical ideas every morning and surely many witticisms that arise in the heat of the moment and even the mood that comes with each morning's wakefulness.

No, what needs to be analysed is why these types of political personalities continue to reach power... at the top of the summit and find the underlying reason why a majority group of citizens - from all social and professional strata, whether more or less educated - vote for them. Because a vote is a great demonstration of trust.

Mexico's current president joins a long list of populists in the Latin American region, many others before him who also hated, despised, minimised and altered the form and substance of presidential power. That presidential power that is so damaging because it creates little mini-gods over the course of six years.

Just look at the experience of the last decades in Brazil, Nicaragua, Colombia, Peru, Honduras, Uruguay, Argentina and even the paroxysm in Venezuela, which has been plunged for many years into a decomposition of the state and the flight of part of society away from the clutches of Nicolás Maduro, the political heir of the satrap Hugo Chávez.

Why vote for a person whose personality, way of thinking and ideology are very similar to those of other politicians in other countries in the region who have turned their respective countries into failed states or collapsed economies?

López Obrador's political personality combined with his way of being is no surprise to those who did not vote for him and were not wrong not to do so because they knew he would be a terrible ruler and a danger to democracy.

And a damage to the economy and now in the middle of a pandemic, when countries need to have more confidence in foreign direct investment, he pretends to act as an investor scarecrow obsessed with creating a fictitious problem with Spain.

Somehow Latin American populists like to charge Spain as if that would empower them, as if historical reproach per se would make indigenous communities have a better quality of life or the poor stop being less poor. In reality it is just giving the people a grievance to feed on.

The famous pause expressed by López Obrador between Mexico and Spain is part of a shameful commentary ignorant of the value of binational relations and international respect for the other. It is not a relationship with a couple that can be paused; it is a relationship with a country that is linked by very strong cultural, historical, investment, economic, human and diplomatic ties.

And just when it seemed that the waters were going to calm down, after Spain gave the go-ahead to the former governor of Sinaloa, Quirino Ordaz, to serve as the new ambassador to Spain, inexplicably, out of nowhere, a new mess provoked by AMLO appears.

Spain and Mexico are more than a president who will sooner or later end his term in power. Personally, I would like to know what or who is encouraging López Obrador's animosity towards the Iberian country.

He still has three years left in office, he has a good part of the Congress in his favour, he has time to scheme and have them whisper in his ear how to make up for the absence of the pardon he requested from the Spanish monarchy. He has time to let Spain know that he has the power in Mexico.