“I don’t agree with what they’re doing to former [US] president Trump,” says President Lopez Obrador, suggesting Donald Trump was indicted to cease him operating for president in 2024.
(AP Archive)
Mexican President Andres Manuel Lopez Obrador has criticised felony costs towards Donald Trump, suggesting that they had been politically motivated to harm his 2024 election prospects.
“Supposedly legal matters should not be used for purposes of electoral politics,” Lopez Obrador instructed reporters on Wednesday, a day after the previous US president pleaded not responsible to 34 felony counts associated to alleged hush-money paid to an grownup movie star.
“That’s why I don’t agree with what they’re doing to former president Trump,” Lopez Obrador added throughout one in every of his each day press briefings, through which he typically opines on wide-ranging subjects.
He described the fees towards 76-year-old Trump, who has already introduced one other White House bid, as a “smear campaign.”
It is the second time in current weeks that Lopez Obrador, 69, has come out in defence of Trump.
On March 21, he had steered that if Trump was indicted it could be to cease him operating for president subsequent yr.
“It should be the people who decide,” mentioned Lopez Obrador, who mentioned he couldn’t say whether or not Trump was responsible or not.
Personal motivations
Lopez Obrador, a left-wing populist, had cordial relations with Trump regardless of the right-wing populist’s fiery rhetoric, similar to throughout his 2016 election marketing campaign when he branded Mexican migrants “rapists” and drug sellers, except for Trump’s plan to construct a wall between the 2 international locations.
Apart from the United States, Mexico’s president has additionally waded into the politics of different international locations, most notably Peru, whose president was faraway from workplace late final yr.
Lopez Obrador has repeatedly described the ouster of Pedro Castillo, who tried to dissolve Congress and rule by decree, as “illegal.”
Those remarks have sparked a diplomatic spat between the 2 international locations, with Peru expelling Mexico’s ambassador in late February.
Lopez Obrador’s motivations for defending Trump could also be private.
Beginning in 2004, Lopez Obrador, then the mayor of Mexico City and the frontrunner for Mexico’s presidential election in 2006, was the topic of a judicial course of that he mentioned was a political plot by Mexico’s then-president Vicente Fox.
The federal authorities’s finally unsuccessful effort to place Lopez Obrador on trial for costs of contempt of court docket threatened to maintain him from operating for president.
Lopez Obrador went on to lose the 2006 and 2012 presidential election – outcomes he didn’t settle for, alleging huge voter fraud.
Source: TRTWorld and companies
Source: www.trtworld.com
