Defending the poor: Big business to stop being so

Gerardo Fernández Noroña has served as a federal legislator three times since 2009 and is currently the president of the Senate. He was a member of the PRD and PT parties for years and has been a member of Morena since 2024. His net salary as a legislator has ranged between 74,000 and 132,000 pesos per month, plus bonuses equivalent to 40 days of per diem. In total, his legislative income amounts to around 13.6 million pesos, a considerable amount that fairly reflects the representative work conferred upon him by the Constitution.

But the story doesn't end there. Noroña found another source of income: social media. In 2022, he officially declared 2.68 million pesos earned from his "video chats" on YouTube and Facebook. That figure is equivalent to more than 188,000 pesos a month, an income higher than his legislative allowance. His YouTube channel has around 839,000 subscribers, and his videos average between 20,000 and 50,000 views; on Facebook, although advertising pays a little more per 1,000 views, that doesn't explain the multi-million dollar figure either. What sustains his finances are super chats, donations, and memberships from hundreds of followers willing to contribute between 50 and 500 pesos per broadcast.

Based on this evidence, it's likely that between 2020 and 2025, Noroña will have earned between 10 and 18 million pesos from his followers, with a median estimate of 14 million. In other words, he has earned more from his informal online chats than he did as a legislator.

The legality of this practice is not in doubt. The law allows legislators to have additional income, provided they declare it and do not use public resources to obtain it. But legality is not always the same as ethicality. It is, to say the least, problematic for a popular representative to turn his or her militant base into a self-financing community. Even if it is transparent, the perception that a senator lives better as an influencer than as a public servant erodes trust in institutions.

For Fernández Noroña, defending the poor ended up becoming a big business. His rhetoric against inequality contrasts with the fact that a large part of his digital income comes from contributions made by ordinary citizens who, in many cases, barely have enough to live on. That a politician who calls himself a defender of the dispossessed should receive money from those who are not rich is, at the very least, a contradiction that is difficult to justify. In the end, defending the poor became a highly profitable activity: a huge personal business that, paradoxically, allowed Noroña to stop being poor thanks to those who have the least.

In a country where politics is often confused with business, seeing a legislator capitalize on digital donations raises uncomfortable questions: Does he represent the citizens or his most loyal supporters? Does he use his position to inform or to monetize? Noroña thus embodies a contradiction of our time: a politician who earns twice as much, as a legislator and as a YouTuber. Legal, yes. Ethically, highly debatable. And above all, it's worrying that, in terms of income, it's more profitable for him to talk to his followers—most of whom are not wealthy—than to legislate for everyone.

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