AMLO, Mexico's answer to Donald Trump
THESE days Mexicans agree on two things. Their football team’s victory over Germany on June 17th was magnificent. And the elections on July 1st will be the most important in decades. The front-runner for the presidency, Andrés Manuel López Obrador, leads a coalition called “Juntos haremos historia” (“Together we will make history”). His opponents fear that he will achieve just that, in a bad way.
Mr López Obrador, who has run for the presidency twice before, has a folksy air of incorruptibility that enchants many Mexicans. He promises a “radical revolution”. Some hear that as a threat. Mr López Obrador has at times opposed the measures earlier governments have taken to modernise the economy. His critics liken him to Hugo Chávez, whose “Bolivarian revolution” has brought ruin to Venezuela. The nationalist populism he offers is unlike anything Mexico has seen since the early 1980s. And if the polls are right, he will win.
With that, Latin America’s second-biggest country will join a clutch of democracies where electorates have rebelled against the established order. What is about to happen in Mexico feels akin to the election of Donald Trump in America, Britain’s vote to leave the European Union and Italy’s turn towards populism. It may be repeated in Brazil, where the front-runner to win the presidency in October is Jair Bolsonaro, who speaks viciously about gay people but warmly of military rule.
The causes of popular anger vary. In Latin America, as elsewhere, voters are furious at elites they regard as corrupt, ineffectual and condescending. Just as American populists decry the “swamp” in Washington and Brazilians are aghast at the filth of their political class, Mr López Obrador fulminates against the “mafia of power” that he claims controls Mexico.
https://www.economist.com/leaders/2018/06/23/amlo-mexicos-answer-to-donald-trump
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