On Saturday December 6, after seven years in power, Morena overflowed the capital’s Zócalo. The cherry mass, as spontaneous as it was carried, reached the tone of the great occasions of Labor in a celebration of power which could not erase the great debt of the regime: its inability to generate economic growth.
President Claudia Sheinbaum closes 2025 with ascending political vigor. In the last days of the year, Congress proposed the same reform for the Executive to regulate the exploitation of water as never before, another to impose new tariffs and laws that galvanize the collection authority.
In the area of security, in December he reconfigured the Attorney General’s Office by defenestrating Alejandro Gertz Manero – a real demonstration of command – to repeat the project that gave him good results in the capital by practically inserting into the FGR tables made by and for the Secretary of Security.
And he had a visit to Washington, where he soberly represented Mexico in the World Cup draw, as part of a successful face-off with Donald Trump; while at the local level, he maintained the course of double-digit increases in the minimum wage and dealt a new blow to PRIAN, by imprisoning a former governor of Chihuahua.
Without ignoring the challenges of violence – which manifests itself in extortions and disappearances that do not give in and in bloody struggles like that of Michoacán, where on the same Saturday of the celebration of Zocalino, a car bomb killed five people – at the end of the year, the president has only one elusive task pending: Mexico is not growing.
So much presidential power, practically equal to or greater than that of his impulsive predecessor, and such meager statistics. In the face of dire predictions that things are far from fixed, Sheinbaum can assert that the primary cause of the economic downturn is almost entirely beyond his control: the agenda of the mercurial Trump.
Without it being a lie that the uncertainty that weighs the most on the Mexican economy comes from Washington, the path of former Mexican presidents to the hell of crises is paved with technical explanations. And at the National Palace, they know it very well.
Sheinbaum reaches zero hour in economic terms. Therefore, in the absence of a single reform among those announced – electoral reform, which, if it fulfills the omens of being pro-regime, will make even more noise in the business sector – time is running out for a new relationship between Sheinbaum and private initiative. And timing helps.
The change in the presidency of the Business Coordination Council could not be more providential, since José Medina Mora arrived this week to replace Francisco Cervantes, who, extraordinarily, stayed longer than usual at the head of the CCE.
The president has the opportunity to establish a real alliance and on his terms with Medina Mora, a businessman with his own prestige, a voice made of his identity and not an encomendero like Cervantes, a character who can also be said to have been inherited in one way or another from the previous sexennium.
The situation is ideal for an institutionalization of dialogue and negotiation between a president who, in private, does not hesitate to debate with businessmen, and an organization, the CCE, which seeks to build a space different from the one it has had over the last seven years, both with López Obrador and with Sheinbaum herself.
Medina Mora has everything on paper to offer the president cooperation to make investments happen as much as possible, while Trump continues to threaten to cancel the USMCA or impose new tariffs. The condition is that both parties agree on what they need from each other.
While, strong from having been a unity candidate, Medina Mora offers the president a constructive dialogue and decisive contributions to defend the USMCA in the United States, she must make it the number one Claudist, so that the doubts of businessmen about the neo-statism in vogue are somewhat dissipated.
The above goes beyond finding common ground between two people and even allowing them to develop empathy. The new president of the CCE must ensure that thousands of small and medium-sized entrepreneurs stop considering the governing organization as a club that does not represent them, at a time when, among other things, the Tax Administration Service is attacking them with unprecedented frequency.
Due to his past at the head of the Mexican Employers’ Confederation (COPARMEX), which he led at the national level from 2021 to 2024, Medina Mora’s arrival at the CCE was interpreted as a commercial gamble to make more heard the demands regarding SAT audits, highway robberies, extortion in general and the incessant changing of the rules since Andrés Manuel’s Plan C.
Medina Mora is unlikely to choose the path of polarization or stridency. His mandate is, like that of the president, to make the investment: to provide arguments and ideas so that the government solves its problems and that there is sufficient energy, quality and price; In addition, conditions of security and legal certainty.
Claiming is not the path envisaged by the new leader. He wants to contribute. More work even if there are not as many photos as was the mark in the Cervantes era, given to paraphernalia and events as few presidents of the entire CCE have had in recent years.
The president is thus offered another opportunity. Create your own relationship with the newcomer to the CCE, get rid of the trap you found and even take care of Altagracia Gómez, a businesswoman to whom you entrust the management of affairs, but who is already showing the wear and tear of a year without major results in an ad hoc council and due to the noise of legitimate doubts about her obvious conflict of interest.
The departure of Cervantes, who, although they invented a bewitched position to keep him in the corridors of power, was reached by versions that link him to the controversial Raúl Rocha, co-owner of Miss Universe accused, among others, of huachicol, can open a window to the president on a relationship that provides investments.
A decisive year lies ahead for her. All the vigor of Morena’s protests, every undeniable display of power, whether with changes as strong as that in the Prosecutor’s Office, or with his triumphant visit to Washington, and of course the consolidation and expansion of social programs, will collapse without economic growth.
Just a few months ago, Sheinbaum and Medina Mora formed an unlikely duo. Precisely because of the vocal nature of his questions in previous responsibilities, if the latter reinforces a profile of guarantor of the commitment of the former so that businessmen are not in too much of a hurry, and the vocation to unblock, or even multiply mixed investment projects is real, 2026 could better cushion Trumpian intemperance.
Nothing that has been said implies that frankness in differences should be abandoned in the relationship. Medina Mora is aware that many businessmen need the government to be publicly informed of the reasons, from accordion judicial elections to ministers who want to overturn the principle of res judicata, which bothers them.
Even less should we think that Sheinbaum will be captive to requests for return of privileges or advantages.
The main thing is that these unlikely traveling companions create a new dynamic, which gives everyone the opportunity to trust and which protects the investment from the outbursts that many of the president’s co-religionists then leave. Will they succeed?
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