Mexico City, May 29, 2021: In 29 or his last 36 morning press conferences, President Andrés Manuel López Obrador has violated the Constitution by disseminating government propaganda and seeking to influence voters' electoral preferences.
MV Note: López Obrador has held a one-hour morning press conference every morning at 7:00 AM since he took office on December 1, 2018.For this reason, the National Electoral Institute (INE) has again ordered the President to stop his actions in the nine days that remain of the electoral process.
MV Note: On Sunday, June 6, all five hundred members of the Chamber of Deputies, the lower house of Congress, as well as fifteen governors and many state and local officials will be chosen. Morena (the Movement for National Regeneration, the party created by López Obrador in 2014), controls both chambers of the current LXIV Congress. With is allied parties, it holds three hundred and thirty-four out of five hundred seats in the Chamber of Deputies. They can run for re-election for up to four terms. Senators are not up for reelection, as they hold six-year terms that began in 2018.
Morena also holds a majority of state governorships and in a majority of state legislatures. Because of this Morena hegemony, the traditional three parties, the centrist PRI (Party of the Institutional Revolution, which held sole power for seventy years, until 2000 and again from 2012 to 2018), the neo-liberal PAN (National Action Party, which held the presidency from 2000 to 2012), and leftist PRD (Party of the Democratic Revolution) have formed a common front, presenting single candidates to compete with Morena for all positions.
The Complaint Committee of the National Institute issued the following order:
"The President of Mexico, Andrés Manuel López Obrador, is ordered to refrain from continuing to carry out acts that involve the dissemination of government propaganda in a prohibited period (the official campaign period of April 4 through June 5), as well as the probable transgression of the principles of impartiality and neutrality contained in articles 41 and 134 of the Constitution, in order to safeguard the principle of fairness in the ongoing electoral process."
The Technical Litigation Unit of the Electoral Institute reported that in the morning news conferences held from April 5, one day after the start of the federal campaign, to May 26, the President did not respect the law for 459 minutes in his talking. From the committee's statement, it is evident that López Obrador was notified of his violations of the electoral ban.
The document that the Complaint Committee sent to the President states:
"It is a serious violation of the principles of fairness, impartiality and neutrality, which justifies and makes necessary the intervention of this national electoral authority in order to stop the harmful effects that this type of conduct could generate in the electoral process.
"Repeatedly and constantly, said public servant has spoken out about possibly unlawful issues and matters," the INE document emphasizes.