They just elected Claudia Sheinbaum, who is seen as being extremely close to the outgoing president AMLO. Some people were suggesting that she was so close to him that it was really his way of getting another term as president, similar to how Putin stepped down as president of Russia to become PM while Dmitry Medvedev became president in name only.
How true is that? It’s hard to say. My guess is that a lot of it is sexism, thinking that a woman can’t think for herself and a woman president will turn to someone else for the important decisions.
But, it’s true that under AMLO, there was a lot of democratic backsliding in Mexico. OTOH, Mexico has been dominated by PAN and PRI for decades. In fact, PRI won 14 elections in a row between 1928 and 1994. It wasn’t until Vincente Fox in 2000 that PAN was even a factor. So, there’s a lot of the power structures in Mexico geared towards supporting PRI and PAN.
They were probably undermining a lot of the things AMLO wanted to accomplish. If he had followed all the rules and norms he might not have been able to accomplish anything because the establishment would have blocked everything he tried to do. That doesn’t excuse his rule and law breaking, but it does contextualize it.
We’ll see what happens with Sheinbaum. I, for one, am fucking thrilled that Mexico’s president has a PhD in energy engineering. The fact she’s a woman is also historical, but to me the doctorate is more important.
It’s no more stupid than citizenship by descent. Why should someone get citizenship just because of the citizenship of their parents? Shouldn’t they have to live in the country? Shouldn’t they speak the language? Shouldn’t they go through the country’s school system?
Europe’s combination of freedom of movement and only Jus Sanguinis has resulted in a situation where there are lots of people with citizenship to a place they’ve never lived, and no citizenship to the place they’ve lived their entire lives.
Really though, how citizenship should be awarded depends on if it’s an obligation or an opportunity. If a country is at war and drafting all citizens of a certain age, citizenship is an obligation the state puts on its citizens. If a country is at peace and provides a social safety net to all citizens, citizenship is an opportunity for its citizens. If the world were fair, people would be able to choose whether or not they wanted citizenship when they reached adulthood. It shouldn’t be something that happened automatically to children based either on who their parents were or on where they were born.