The scene carries a certain historical irony. Thousands of CNTE teachers are blocking strategic avenues, taking over toll booths, storming public offices, and threatening to disrupt the festive atmosphere of the FIFA World Cup 2026, just days before its inauguration at the Azteca Stadium. On the other side of the board is not a conservative government or a neoliberal president; it is a left-wing administration that for years championed many of these causes, shared public squares, and made the teachers’ demands its own political banner. And yet, the political conflict in Mexico City is escalating. The National Coordinator of Education Workers is not fighting against the ghost of Felipe Calderón; it is directly measuring forces against President Claudia Sheinbaum. This is the true dimension of this governance crisis.
The Pension Dilemma: A Legitimate Cause Meets Fiscal Reality
For almost two decades, the repeal of the 2007 ISSSTE Law has been one of the main demands of the dissident teachers’ union. That reform substantially modified the pension system, transferring millions of state workers to an individual account scheme or Afores. Since then, thousands of teachers have watched with deep concern as retirement approaches, only to discover that the promised pension no longer exists in the solidarity terms their parents knew. It would be mean-spirited to deny that behind the social mobilization there is a legitimate cause. The discussion about the future of public pensions in Mexico is not a conjunctural whim or a union caprice; it is a real structural debate that affects millions of public employees.
The very movement that today governs the country fueled this social discontent for years and promised to review an economic model it considered profoundly unjust. So what happens when a campaign promise collides head-on with the rigidity of a spreadsheet? The answer is usually cruel. Political slogans have infinite elasticity; the budget, not. President Claudia Sheinbaum has acknowledged that a complete repeal of the ISSSTE regulations would have fiscal consequences of an unsustainable magnitude. It is not an ideological rupture, but crude financial mathematics. These are pension commitments accumulated over decades; resources that would have to come from public coffers and inevitably compete with spending on social programs, infrastructure, health, or public education itself.
Governing the country, and particularly the capital, entails brutal pedagogy. While the opposition promises without cost, the government calculates; while the opposition denounces injustices, the government signs the checks; while the opposition mobilizes emotions, the government discovers the real limits of the treasury.
Dialogue in a Loop: The Limits of Negotiation
Perhaps that is why the dialogue tables set up with the Ministry of Interior (Segob), the SEP, and the ISSSTE seem to be in a dead end loop. Key officials such as Rosa Icela Rodríguez, Mario Delgado, and Martí Batres can offer complementary mechanisms, administrative adjustments, or new institutional negotiation routes. What they cannot do is fabricate a budgetary margin that simply does not exist. However, recognizing the legitimacy of a labor demand does not oblige one to justify any method of pressure to promote it.
The images of recent weeks in the capital speak for themselves: vandalized public offices, damaged historical monuments, and road blocks that paralyze a metropolis where millions of people are simply trying to get to their workplaces, schools, or return home. While the teachers’ leadership pressures the National Palace, the costs of the protest are ultimately paid by ordinary citizens, oblivious to the negotiation.
The Paradox of Power: When Allies Become Adversaries
Here emerges a question that the Mexican left never had to answer while in opposition: can a democratic government allow a legitimate cause to transform into a permanent license to paralyze the country’s capital? The answer, under no circumstances, should be repression. Mexico knows too well the deep wounds left by the arbitrary use of public force. But the alternative cannot be the absolute renunciation of exercising the rule of law.
Max Weber defined the State as the institution that holds the legitimate monopoly of physical violence. In that famous premise, the key word is not force, but legitimate. Democratic authority does not consist of hitting harder than dissidents, but of ensuring that the exercise of the rights of one sector does not cancel the freedoms and human rights of others. For years, the left denounced that the old regime used the state apparatus to crush social conflicts. Today it faces a much more complex dilemma: how to act when those who block Mexico City are their own historical allies?
Hannah Arendt wrote that authority completely disappears when it is no longer able to persuade and also dares not to act. The sentence seems tailored to the current political moment. The federal government fails to convince the CNTE, but it is also unwilling to impose clear limits on public roads. Between paralysis and omission, a gray area appears where governability slowly begins to evaporate.
World Cup Countdown: A City Under Pressure
For the local and federal administration, the calendar has become a more dangerous adversary than the partisan opposition itself. As negotiations at the working tables drag on, this year’s FIFA World Cup is upon them. Mexico City seeks to project an image of modernity, security, and organizational capacity to billions of spectators around the world. However, on the eve of the inauguration, public digital conversation and international headlines revolve around traffic chaos, sit-ins in the Zócalo, confrontations, and a political conflict that no one seems able to defuse.
The CNTE has placed the ruling party before a very uncomfortable mirror. It reminds them of the promises made when governing was a distant horizon; it demands they fulfill commitments built from the shelter of protest, and it exposes an uncomfortable truth that every ruler discovers sooner or later: that public finances are much less ideological than politicians would wish.
Beyond the Capital: Coahuila as a Political Barometer
This crossroads in the Mexican capital is not the only open front for the ruling party; a parallel battle is quietly unfolding in the north of the country, specifically in Coahuila. It is not just a local election or the renewal of mayoralties; it is a real measurement of political temperature at a moment of special vulnerability for Morena. Geopolitical pressure from the United States, constant security criticisms seeking to wear down the ruling party, and the natural wear and tear of almost eight years of a political project in federal power have begun to erode some of the massive political capital built since the 2018 triumph.
Therefore, the electoral result in Coahuila matters more than traditional analysts suggest. Not because it will reconfigure the country’s immediate geopolitical map, but because it will serve as a laboratory to observe whether the new narrative of national sovereignty retains enough traction to contain the wear and tear of the old and compromised banner of honesty. Ballot boxes rarely explain the complexity of an era on their own, but they always reveal with mathematical precision when the common sense of a society begins to change.
Source: https://capital-cdmx.org/los-aliados-que-hoy-cercan-al-poder-y-la-cdmx/
