POWER WITHOUT AN ENTOURAGE

What happens when someone occupies the chair, but doesn’t occupy the center?

In Mexico, for decades, the presidency was a perfect machine of obedience. The president didn’t just govern: he commanded the symbolic system. He was the center of gravity. Everything revolved around him.

The PRI members had a party. They had discipline. There was a choreography that no one broke.

Fox, even as an anomaly, had a cabinet that understood the moment: the “government of change” demanded cohesion.

Calderon, with all his internal conflicts, was never publicly snubbed by his own people.

López Obrador, of course, exercised power with a mixture of charisma, threat, and control: no one doubted who was in charge.

With Sheinbaum, something strange is happening.

Her image projects seriousness. Order. A strict school principal.

Her propaganda insists that she is “scientific,” rational, methodical.

But the problem isn’t her tone.

The problem is that her investiture doesn’t translate into visible obedience.

Sheinbaum is experiencing something that hasn’t happened to any recent president: she’s losing control.

There’s a public — daily — feeling that her authority isn’t organizing her own people.

That her party doesn’t reflect her.

That her movement doesn’t protect her.

That her cabinet doesn’t act as an extension of her.

The example is brutal because it’s symbolic: a massive event, cameras rolling, the hierarchy gathered… and a group of prominent figures from her own government don’t even turn to look at her as she passes by.

Power doesn’t reside solely in decrees. It lives in gestures. In deference. In choreographed displays.

Another issue is that while she speaks of “moderation” and “closeness to the people,” figures from her inner circle appear — again and again — flaunting jewelry, trips, and luxuries. Cynicism.

The result is devastating: the president says one thing, but the apparatus says another. And when the apparatus contradicts the center, what is the center?

Sheinbaum didn’t build her own base. She didn’t arrive as the leader of an internal tribe. She arrived as a successor. As continuity. Although she holds the position, she doesn’t have the entourage.

She has the chair, but not the emotional and disciplinary machinery that makes others act like satellites.

At the beginning of the year, López Obrador appeared on social media saying that “we shouldn’t overshadow the president”… while doing exactly that: grabbing the attention, occupying the symbolic space.

Power is not an appointment.

What we are seeing in Mexico is an anomaly: a presidency with resources, with propaganda, with investiture… but without a center.