"The salinistas who invoke a Sheinbaum-López Obrador split calculate that only a fight could hand them what they've failed to win on their own," argues Delgado.

This article by Álvaro Delgado Gómez originally appeared in the September 1, 2026 edition of SinEmbargo, an independent Mexican digital news outlet.

When Claudia Sheinbaum assumed the Presidency of the Republic, she was advised to distance herself from Andrés Manuel López Obrador, to “move to the center,” while at the same time they accused her of submitting to her predecessor, and over time they invented a rift between the two that, in these days of Rubén Rocha Moya’s fleeting return and Andrés López Beltrán’s visa, was presented as a breakup, a fantasy that—once again—has had misogyny and authoritarian nostalgia as its correlate.

The authors of such treacheries come from the rancid PRIAN conservatism and, more specifically, from the addicts of Carlos Salinas de Gortari, the same ones who dominate Mexico’s information spaces and who were empowered during the six-year term of this figure marked by electoral fraud, high corruption and political repression, including disappearance and murder.

Just because Salinas de Gortari left the Presidency he stole in 1988 does not mean that he has stopped having power and influence, which he exercises in the economic, political, academic and intellectual spheres, and increasingly with less effectiveness through his media and opinion-makers, who view the national reality with the old categories of analysis, the PRI school of verticalism, exacerbated presidentialism and serious corruption, not trifles.

It is these specimens of salinismo, and their apprentices, who invoke a rupture between Sheinbaum and López Obrador, like the one that existed between Salinas de Gortari and Ernesto Zedillo in 1994. Except that there are no parallels, no analogous times, circumstances, or figures.

In the first place, at present there is no economic crisis as devastating as the one that broke out in December 1994, which threw millions into poverty, stripped just as many of their assets, and indebted the country through Fobaproa to bail out bankers, businessmen and politicians. There isn’t even a crisis.

Zedillo broke with Salinas de Gortari for having handed him Mexico’s economy held together by pins, and then he pulled the pins out, as the other irresponsible one shot back, in a diatribe that devastated the Nation and threw them both into the dustbin of history. Let it not be forgotten that the unheard-of corruption of Raúl Salinas also set them against each other.

In the second place, Sheinbaum triumphed with 60 percent of the electorate, which contrasts with the fraudulent condition of Salinas and of Zedillo himself. If the former began with spectacular actions, it was because of his spurious condition, and the latter opened himself to an Electoral Reform precisely because of the inequity of his election and the damage he did to Mexico’s economy.

Why would Sheinbaum distance herself from or break with López Obrador if both enjoy, together and separately, a popular support that Salinas and Zedillo never had, not even Vicente Fox, and much less Felipe Calderón and Enrique Peña Nieto? What does the President of Mexico gain by separating herself from her predecessor? Nothing.

The nostalgics of PRI authoritarianism, those who drink from the salinismo that came to power through crimes and wielded it like a monarch—it even gave away governorships to the PAN and corrupted intellectuals—see one swallow and conclude that it is summer. Suddenly, the foul-mouthed Rocha Moya feels like returning to the governorship of Sinaloa, and this is the evidence that Sheinbaum has no power and that the one in charge is López Obrador.

Proof? Not a single one. Only the word of the analysts, of course, who belong to the dirty little school of “the truth is now irrelevant.”

The salinismo analysts also claim that today there is no Secretariat of Governance like when “don Fernando” was there, the torturer and murderer Gutiérrez Barrios; there is no “iron fist” like with Calderón and the drug trafficker Genaro García Luna, with whom those analysts frolicked; there is no “political craft” like with Peña Nieto’s PRI, which was very corrupt but handed out “cuddles,” and they even miss the flabby Santiago Creel and his coordinator of advisers, María Amparo Casar, who became a millionaire by ill means.

From her presidential candidacy to the first third of her Government, whose Second Report she presents this Tuesday, September 1, misogynist prianismo has wanted to “size up” Sheinbaum, and they have been getting surprises.

Sheinbaum has had to set aside figures who, promoted by López Obrador, became dysfunctional for her six-year project: Adán Augusto López Hernández was pushed to step down from the coordination of Morena in the Senate over the La Barredora scandal, and Prosecutor Alejandro Gertz Manero left the post to go off as Ambassador.

The big fight between Luisa Alcalde and López Beltrán in Morena’s national leadership, which put at risk President Sheinbaum’s midterm election, also entailed the replacement of both, in the logic of electoral effectiveness, not of a rupture with López Obrador.

And in the months ahead there will surely be more moves in the presidential Cabinet, also in the logic of effectiveness as a Government in the second three-year period and to prepare the succession with sufficient room for maneuver, amid the many forces and groups with legitimate and spurious interests that the Fourth Transformation is.

Morena’s coalition with the Green and Labor parties also entails an intense negotiation for the distribution of power—that is democracy—but there is no rationality between having these objectives and breaking with López Obrador, in what would be devastating for both, above all because of how much history matters to them.

Why would López Obrador want to stain his legacy with cross-term ambitions and undue influence over Sheinbaum? Why would he want to imitate Plutarco Elías Calles? To impose his son on the Presidency of the Republic? He isn’t even Morena’s Secretary of Organization anymore. And even if he wanted to promote him, charisma is not inherited, nor are Mexicans anyone’s subjects.

In reality, the salinismo analysts who invoke a Sheinbaum-López Obrador rupture, those who yearn for it without any rational basis, are the ones who calculate politically that only a fight could give them an opportunity to obtain what they have not been able to achieve on their own, neither with Xóchitl Gálvez nor now with Ricardo Salinas Pliego, a spawn of salinismo.

Finally, the reasoning and the bet of salinismo is not so stupid: a rupture between Sheinbaum and López Obrador would devastate the movement that both founded and that has already triumphed twice in overwhelming fashion. Both know the immense historical cost, and that is, precisely, what makes it unviable…

Álvaro Delgado Gómez

Álvaro Delgado Gómez is a journalist, born in Lagos de Moreno, Jalisco, in 1966.  
He began in 1986 as a reporter and has passed through the newsrooms of El Financiero, El Nacional and El Universal.

The post The Sheinbaum-López Obrador Rupture appeared first on Mexico Solidarity Media.

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