Will Mexico Elect its First Leftist President Since 1934?
Mexico’s presidential elections are three months away and Andrés Manuel López Obrador (AMLO) of the Morena party has a double-digit lead in the polls. In a three-way race with no runoff, this is what a potential landslide looks like. If he wins on July 1, AMLO would be the first leftist to become the country’s president since 1934 when Lázaro Cárdenas, a revered hero of the Mexican Revolution and Mexico’s own FDR figure, was elected. Needless to say, a left turn would be a big change for Mexico, where seven decades of rule by the authoritarian PRI were followed by 18 years of the PRI and the center-right PAN alternating in power.
In the United States, the Mexican presidential election has been mostly ignored, swamped by coverage of Trump, school shootings and other domestic concerns. Where AMLO’s lead has received attention, it has been treated with a mixture of incredulity and fear. The financial sector, in particular, is worried that an AMLO government will cancel oil contracts negotiated by the Enrique Peña Nieto administration or even pull out of NAFTA. Among more general observers in the United States, little is known about AMLO beyond the caricature of him painted by his opponents at home: He is a messianic populist who wants to take Mexico back to a time of autocratic politics and economic mismanagement.
Mexicans have heard it all before. They heard it in 2006, when AMLO lost the presidency to the PAN’s Felipe Calderón by less than 1 percentage point, and again in 2012 when he lost by more than 6 points to the PRI’s Peña Nieto. This time around they appear to be inoculated against tired anti-left propaganda. They are angry, they want things to change and they believe AMLO is the one who will deliver. Though opponents would like to brand those who support AMLO as ignorant fools, it is the country’s middle classes who are giving him an edge: 43 percent of college-educated voters favor the leftist candidate while 17 percent of the same group would vote for the PAN and only 10 percent would vote for the PRI.
Fueling the left’s surge in Mexico is widespread indignation at the traditional parties that have failed to remedy the country’s problems. Both Calderón and Peña Nieto put security at the top of their agenda but violence persists while its root causes — bad governance, corruption and poverty — remain untouched. Successive governments have paid lip service to reducing the gap between the rich and the poor, but social programs have been ineffective. Mexico is still a country of abysmal inequality where over 50 million poor coexist with the richest man in Latin America.
Read more: https://www.texasobserver.org/will-mexico-elect-its-first-leftist-president-since-1934/
