Burying a voice from the past

It's true that the self-proclaimed Fourth Transformation and Ernesto Zedillo's government are indeed like oil and water, but it's also clear who wields power today and how they do so.

What former President Ernesto Zedillo says today will be a message that, first of all, will reach very few, his usual readers, and they will have to understand that the person expressing it held power 30 years ago.

The regime's response is a widely disseminated disqualification that seeks, as it has done for the past seven years, to divide, not confront ideas, but to show that there are some, they, the righteous, the good, and others, they, the bad, the spokespeople of neoliberalism and injustice.

Time has put Ernesto Zedillo in his place, and it's actually a good position.

That government, which began with a financial crisis, nevertheless allowed Mexico to lay the foundation for those 20 years of stability, confidence, and democratic growth that were the hallmark of the Mexican economy until López Obrador's arrival.

But three decades have passed, and it turns out that in Mexico, around 65% of the population is under 40. Ernesto Zedillo is a historical reference, not a point of comparison for all those young people, based on his own knowledge.

Even without having the opportunity to assess Zedillo's authority and contributions to Mexican politics, we must listen to the former president when he says that the judicial election is a sham, because no democratic country has such a practice.

His words: "That's something dictators only invent to control the judiciary. They say it's an election: yes, an election of candidates that they, with a lot of trickery, have determined."

When Ernesto Zedillo says that democracy has died in Mexico and that a police state is under construction, these are words that will circulate in very small circles, but they should be carefully considered.

Mexicans in 30 years will have the insight to evaluate the current exercise of power and compare it with Mexico at the end of the 20th century.

For now, the regime has a highly advanced model for exercising power, the culmination of which was the creation of an artificial qualified majority after last year's elections.

And with the propaganda fortune of facing another devastating populism like that of Donald Trump, which has had two edges.

The obvious one is the most serious, because the President of the United States has decided to break with the global development model that they themselves had imposed and that, in fact, had worked.

But the other side of the same coin is the advantage of being able to identify, within local populisms, a foreign enemy that distracts and can be told that Mexico should not be used as a piñata, while internally there is an institutional rift underway.

Yes, Ernesto Zedillo has a harrowing diagnosis of what's happening in Mexico today, one that clearly requires him to disavow power and bury it in order to continue with his plans.

But it is a fact: that model of an open and more democratic country is over.