Latin America

How AMLO rose to power in Mexico’s skewed system

Mexico has undergone a dramatic political shift in recent years. In this three-part series, we analyze the rise of left-wing President AMLO

AMLO’s coalition “Together we make history” won the 2018 election in a landslide. Photo: Octavio Hoyos/Shuttestock

Over the past week, Mexico has recorded an average of 672 coronavirus deaths per day — trailing only Brazil and the U.S., despite testing fewer patients than most countries. With over 227,000 total confirmed cases and one of the world’s highest coronavirus fatality rates, critics in the foreign and domestic press have equated the attitudes of left-leaning President Andrés Manuel López Obrador, also known as AMLO, to those of his denialist populist counterparts Donald Trump in the U.S. and Brazil’s Jair Bolsonaro — but just how fair is that comparison?

What is actually happening in Latin America’s second-largest economy and what lessons Brazil can draw from it? In this three-part series, we break down the current state of Mexico, beginning with AMLO’s rise to power in 2018.

Introducing AMLO

Like Jair Bolsonaro in Brazil, AMLO came to power through the collapse of Mexico’s existing political system in the wake of rising crime and corruption scandals that devastated the country’s traditional parties.

His own political outfit, the National Regeneration Movement (Morena) went from being AMLO’s personal electoral vehicle to the largest party in the country overnight in 2018, gaining solid majorities in Mexico’s Senate and Congress. 

AMLO himself emerged victorious with 53 percent of the presidential vote, 30 points higher than his closest contender, and winning 31 out of Mexico’s 32 states.

In fact, Morena’s victory in the 2018 elections may well have been the largest electoral victory in history for a left-leaning political party.

Mexico’s political system

For 70 years, between 1921 and 2000, Mexico was run by the Party of the Institutional Revolution (PRI), in what the Peruvian novelist Mario Vargas Llosa once described as “the perfect dictatorship.” Following two decades of economic and social crisis, as well as electoral reform, the right-wing National Action Party (PAN) won the 2000 elections, bringing an end to the PRI’s electoral dominance, even if it remained the largest party in the country.

The last left-wing Mexican president, before AMLO, was Lázaro Cárdenas del Rio, who ruled the country between 1934 and 1940. Mr. Cárdenas is remembered as one of the country’s greatest leaders, largely for his radical land reform, popular education programs, and nationalization of Mexico’s oil industry. In fact, AMLO’s politics stem from this left-wing nationalist tradition within the hegemony of the PRI, intimately tied to the popular mobilization of the peasant class: key to Mexico’s War of Independence in 1821, the War of Reform and Expulsion of the French (1861-1867), and, of course, the Mexican Revolution between 1910 and 1920.

Rather than being Mexico’s answer to other prominent left-leaning leaders around Latin America — such as Hugo Chávez or Luiz Inácio Lula da Silva — AMLO hails from a uniquely Mexican political tradition, which has been apparent throughout his 40 years in public life.

Puebla/Mexico. Man supports AMLO during the coronavirus crisis. Photo: Luis Raul Torres/Shutterstock
Puebla/Mexico. Man supports AMLO during the coronavirus crisis. Photo: Luis Raul Torres/Shutterstock
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