Mexico's Vote for Autocracy [View all]
As Mexico’s June 2 presidential election draws near, more is at stake than a competition among political parties. For the past five and a half years, the country’s prototypical populist leader, Andrés Manuel López Obrador, known as AMLO, has driven a process of democratic backsliding that mirrors developments in countries across the globe. Democracies are no longer dying primarily as a result of military coups carried out by generals with tanks and rifles. Mexico’s democracy, like many others, is being destroyed by a freely elected and popular president who has manipulated democratic institutions and seeks to change not just the rules of the electoral game but also the entire political system so that his party remains in power.
López Obrador’s party, the Movement for National Regeneration (Morena), is mobilizing its supporters to vote for a refurbished autocracy disguised as a democracy. Many Mexicans have succumbed to its allure. The president’s daily press conferences routinely portray his party as concerned for the poor, combating rapacious elites, and defending national sovereignty against internal and external threats, including opposition parties and foreign influence. López Obrador himself governs through polarization. He divides the population into two camps: “the people” versus “the enemies of the people,” the dispossessed versus those who disdain them, the popular movement that seeks change versus the conservative opposition that wants to maintain a status quo that works only for the elites.
López Obrador’s government has taken steps to alleviate poverty, including large cash payments to poor families and an increase in the minimum wage. But on his watch, criminal violence has run rampant, and with many of the education and health programs that formed Mexico’s social safety net replaced by clientelism, the poor are left to fend for themselves. Meanwhile, the president has consolidated his control of state institutions, pushed forward legislation that violates the constitution, and carried out an assault on the judiciary and the agencies that oversee elections. His party rules with the overt support of the military, which the president has empowered at the expense of democracy. The armed forces now serve as the country’s police, build major public works, and control immigration and infrastructure. They have accrued unprecedented economic power and are accountable only to López Obrador himself.
During the electoral campaign, Morena has slandered opposition politicians in state-controlled media and used the state apparatus to harass political opponents. The Mexican military has deployed Pegasus spyware to monitor activists, journalists, and human rights defenders. López Obrador has also used his public platform to doxx his critics. When a federal agency dedicated to government transparency decried the doxxing as a violation of Mexican data protection statutes, the president declared in his morning press conference that he was “above the law.”
https://www.foreignaffairs.com/mexico/mexicos-vote-autocracy
