OPINION: There are obvious signs of a crisis with López Obrador as president

Enrique Campos Suárez journalist, politics expert, analyst and news director at Radio Formula states that a crisis is “guaranteed” in case AMLO wins the presidential election.

There’s no need to wait for Pejeleaks to find tricky stories of Andrés Manuel López Obrador, in order to measure the consequences of the application of populist policies in the Mexican economy, we just need to pay attention to his own sayings.

If we keep the passion and take out the calculator and accompany it with reason, we can see how the economic stability that we have right now (and we do not always value), can turn into chaos in a very short time.

Suspend food imports, guarantee fixed prices for gasoline, suspend the Mexico City new airport project, cancel the reforms. In short, economic-financial fragmentation grenades are evident in AMLO’s speech.

But a couple of days ago, Andrés López already gave us assurances that he plans to take Mexico to an energy, budgetary and inflationary crisis from the first moment of his term, in case he wins the presidential elections, as he promises that he will not raise the prices of energy, such as gasoline, for three years.

When this message is received in the brain amygdala and unleashes the emotions, many feel happy, pleased, euphoric with a news that they perceive as positive because they believe that they will be saving money when filling up the tank of their cars, and that is the desired reaction in a populist election campaign.

If this same information were initially processed by the prefrontal cortex, where the brain’s reasoning centers are, we would automatically stop to ask ourselves how is it possible to freeze the price of products that are governed by international supply and demand and by other random circumstances such as a crisis in Syria or the NAFTA negotiations.

Mexico is not self-sufficient in energy and it will not be in a decade, not even with plans to build Pemex refineries in the national territory (which is another great absurd statement constantly made by AMLO).

There are examples in the recent history of the country. The so-called Mexican right has also had a populist side and during 2009 the government of Felipe Calderón decided to freeze gasoline prices for one whole year. The result was the use and abuse of hundreds of billions of pesos from the public treasury to subsidize a part of the Mexican motorists gasoline tank.

It was a year where oil prices had certainly collapsed. In any case, money was allocated to benefit those who did not really need it. For years, subsidies to gasoline cost public spending a lot of money that could had been used in social programs.

President Enrique Peña Nieto also decided, along with the Congress, not to increase the prices of fuel more thatn 3% during 2016, with the excuse of aligning fuel price with inflation. The result was that, when the prices of gasoline in the world skyrocketed, those “frozen” prices soared in 2017 and the famous gasolinazo came to exist.

It’s guaranteed. Freezing fuel prices is the perfect formula for a new crisis.

López Obrador would guarantee a gasolinazo for 2021, added to the accumulated crisis that we would have by then with all the bad decisions that he intends to take as president of Mexico.

by Enrique Campo Suarez