Rule from the sixth floor 2023/09/28

Claudia Sheinbaum and Xochitl Galvez Not only will they be competing to be the first woman to become President, but to be only the eighth person in their sixties to assume the position – in two centuries of republican life – and the first to succeed someone of the same age group.

Until now the only presidents who were over 60 years old at the time of taking office have been Valentin Gomez Farías (65), Juan N. Alvarez (65), Mariano Rooms (61), José Ignatius Peacock (69), Victorian Vegetable garden (69), Adolfo Ruiz Curtains (62) and Andrew Manuel Lopez Worker (65).

To achieve the same, Sheinbaum He will be 62 years, five months and seven days old; and Galvez61 years nine months and nine days.

Adolfo Lopez Mateossuccessor of Ruiz Curtainswas 49 years old when he wore the presidential sash; Gustavo Diaz Ordaz53; Luis Echeverria48; José Lopez Portillo56; Miguel of the Madrid47; Carlos Salinas of Gortari40; Ernesto Zedillo42; Vincent Fox58; Philip Calderon44; Enrique Grief Grandson52.

Age is not necessarily a determining factor in performance, but it says a lot that the two main candidates to succeed Lopez Worker are over 60 years old in a country whose average age is 29 and whose life expectancy is 74.

One has to wonder why there is not greater participation of young people in politics and what politicians aged 60 and over have to offer citizens a third of their age. Of course, compared to their American peers – the virtual candidates of the Democratic and Republican parties –, Sheinbaum and Galvez They are young girls. But that does not remove the doubt: why are there not a greater number of young people involved in high politics?

You could say that there it is Samuel Garciagovernor of Nuevo León – who could be the Citizen Movement candidate for the Presidency in 2024 – but he is, in any case, an exception to the political participation of young people, and it remains to be seen if he gets the nomination.

Last weekend, the Argentine journalist Martin Caparros wrote in the magazine The weekly country that “our representatives became a race – a 'caste' – odious and hated” and that “politics has become a broom-car of mediocre people”, because “almost no awake young man thinks, when he thinks about his life, who wants to be a politician, because to be one is to be one of those dark beings who manipulate us from living rooms and armchairs.”

The current political participation of the majority, adds Caparros“it consists of voting for someone without much investigation and then feeling disappointed because that man did what anyone could know he would do and then devoting yourself to hating him as if he were the classic Martian who had just gotten out of his convertible drone.”

Politics, he abounds, has become “an exercise that is left for the most perverse or those who do not see themselves capable of thriving with anything else: a consolation prize for the disconsolate.”

I don't know if everything he claims Caparros be entirely applicable to our country, although there is much truth in it. I am part of a generation that in its youth still believed in the changes that could be achieved through politics and from having ideas about how the world could be better.

40 years ago, political parties had a youth sector that gave something to talk about. Some of the leaders I met then went on to occupy important positions based on that experience. One of them was even President of the Republic. Today I don't know who those youth leaders are. What's more, I don't know if those partisan youths even exist, although, in any case, they don't matter or interest. Furthermore, I don't know what would motivate someone, let alone a young person, to join a political party.

Maybe it is as it says Caparros: that politics not only does not excite young people, but they despise it. They know that whoever comes to power will end up disappointing them. Worse still: they don't expect anything else.