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AMLO decides to take a liberty

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Andrés Manuel López Obrador - File photo/EL UNIVERSAL
26/03/2018 |09:49
Redacción El Universal
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AMLO decides to take a liberty

With the calm and peace that all published polls give him, Andrés Manuel López Obrador (AMLO) is taking the liberty not to ask people to vote for him but rather, to ask for the vote on behalf of the candidates to the Congress of his coalition, since he wants to have a majority. While his adversaries José Antonio Meade and Ricardo Anaya are busy in a smear campaign against each other, taking the time once in a while to criticize AMLO, Mr. Andrés doesn't even bother to mention them in the spot he will use to kick off his campaign. He prefers to mention how he is planning on selling the “presidential plane not even Trump has” and how he has even offered it to the U.S. President. Meanwhile, Meade focuses his campaign on his career as a public servant and on making claims that he doesn't have ranches or launders money – in a direct hint towards Anaya – all while Anaya smears the candidate of the PRI, sends clear messages of what sets him apart from AMLO, and gets political figures – including the Mayor of Mexico City, Miguel Ángel Mandera – to talk well about him. When the hour of truth comes, we'll see if someone will still be able to take the liberty of not asking the vote for himself.

Sharing a meal and an adversary

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Last week, two governors of the left Democratic Revolution Party (PRD) met in Mexico City and shared a meal at a restaurant in the Alameda. Arturo Núñez , of Tabasco, and Graco Ramírez , of Morelos, shared a table and a chat in which none smiled all that much. What do these two PRD members have in common? The answer is that in the states of both governors, the candidates of the left National Regeneration Party (MORENA) are favored by the polls, reason why they could have exchanged a few tips during their conversation to contain MORENA in their respective states, taking advantage that both know well their political rival.

Puente, from the Senate to San Lázaro

We're told that the first possibility of the former commissioner of the National Institute for Transparency, Access to Information and Personal Data Protection (INAI), Ximena Puente , was to be nominated by the center-right Institutional Revolutionary Party (PRI) to a seat in the Senate through the plurinominal list. The plan of Ms. Ximena was to provide all her expertise in transparency and data protection from the Upper Chamber, until the PRI made her see her candidacy would be impassable and her work would be overshadowed by criticism and discredit over her decision to join the PRI, and thus, they chose to build Puente a bridge from Reforma and Insurgentes to San Lázaro and place her inside a safety bubble.

The UNAM and the dry grass

High ranking members of the left Democratic Revolution Party (PRD), experts in law, are quite offended with the authorities of the Faculty of Law of the National Autonomous University of Mexico ( UNAM ) for having held a roundtable where the “Technical Legal Analysis of the Anaya Case ” was discussed, last Thursday at the Main Hall of the Faculty. We have to add a certain concern to the offense, given that the electoral process is quite polarized and amidst the situations which have happened at University City as of late, the members of the PRD believe events such as this is akin to playing with fire in a dry grass. The offense escalated given that the dean of the University, Enrique Graue , had asked in previous days not to involve the UNAM in the campaigns. The PRD members, faithful to the colors of the University and who graduated from here, considered that the roundtable had a political motivation against the presidential candidate of the PAN-PRD-MC coalition and are wondering if the director of the Faculty of Law, Raúl Contreras, failed to listen to the words of Mr. Graue.

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