Under the president’s yoke, Andrés Manuel López Obrador’s way of showing which officials he cares about is by placing them at the morning conference. If they don’t exist, they are just the second division of collaborators.

For this reason, now the Secretary of Economy, Tatiana Clouthier, is publicly humiliated with mandatory revisions to the car and reasonable doubts are raised whether this policy should still continue to work for López Obrador, as he had the honor of showing up in the morning as well as from London.

Clouthier lives in the President’s second division and clearly does not have the executive power to negotiate the finer points of a new trade agreement, as is now being discussed with Britain.

Tatiana Clouthier obtained presidential permission to travel to London and meet her British counterpart, Anne-Marie Trevelyan. He carried a message of wanting to start negotiating a deal that would replace the bilateral relationship that existed when Britain became a member of the European Union.

It is a fact that this 4T hybrid government allows free trade if it does not include issues that are in President López Obrador’s outdated nationalist basket.

The thing to watch out for is who will be the presidential candidate to negotiate good points with England. The President hardly wanted to highlight the non-corcholate Tatiana Clouthier.

Moreover, this inorganic government worked not on a position but on a commission basis and López Obrador could entrust commercial negotiations to anyone, whoever was fashionable at the time.

This should be a serious negotiation with Mexico’s sixteenth trading partner, with whom we join the Economic Continuity Agreement, which extended for three years the conditions maintained during British times in the European Union. But the deal had to end.

There is only one thing that the López Obrador regime should not forget, beyond who will be its star negotiator. Europeans were not content with just free trade with zero tariffs on certain goods.

The UK, like members of the European Union, only negotiates with democracies that have strong institutional foundations, and demands guarantees and revisions of human rights and freedom of expression from their potential partners.

The deal with Europe is also a pact respecting the rule of law and it should not be ruled out that now that the continent is trying to secede from Russia, they want to include the freedom to negotiate fuel in their trade agreements.

I hope they consider in Q4 that partnering with the UK in a new free trade agreement has clauses that López Obrador’s autocratic style of government may not accept. There will never be a day like this the President complaining in the morning about the interventionist attitude of the Europeans.

So, for now, lively and colorful in the morning, the recently discredited Tatiana Clouthier has paved the way for the first round of negotiations for a trade agreement with the UK that will start on July 11.

ecampos@eleconomista.mx