Andrés
Manuel López Obrador won a sweeping victory in Mexico’s Presidential
election, promising to end the country’s culture of corruption and to
launch it into a new era.
Photograph by Manuel Velasquez / Getty
To tens
of millions of Mexicans, Sunday’s stunning electoral victory by the
charismatic leftist candidate Andrés Manuel López Obrador, a perpetual
also-ran in the country’s recent Presidential elections, was an
apotheosis. López Obrador, or AMLO, as he is also
called, won fifty-three per cent of the vote, leaving his nearest
rivals, including Ricardo Anaya of the conservative P.A.N. party, far
behind. Not only did López Obrador win; the party that he founded a few
years ago—the Movement for National Regeneration—also won a majority of
seats in both houses of the national legislature, and it took five of
the nine governorships that were up for grabs. It was, as they say, a
real sweep. And unlike a number of recently disputed elections in
Mexico, López Obrador’s win was the chronicle of a victory foretold. To
many observers, he has been the favorite to win this year’s election
since Donald Trump took office, a year and a half ago.
The
outgoing Mexican President, Enrique Peña Nieto, will hand over the reins
to López Obrador on December 1st. He leaves behind a country with
tattered morale and widespread doubts about the future. Rarely has a
President so fumbled his term in power the way Peña Nieto has—from
adopting a posture of obsequiousness with Trump to giving the appearance
of either powerlessness or complicity amidst a culture of wholesale
political corruption. Peña Nieto’s inability to slow down the country’s
gruesome “war on drugs”—which was initiated by his predecessor and has
cost as many as two hundred thousand lives—has deepened the sense of
national despair. He has failed to prosecute some of the most horrific
criminal cases that have occurred on his watch, including the
disappearance and suspected mass murder of forty-three teaching trainees
in the town of Ayotzinapa, an incident that reportedly involved local
politicians, police, a drug gang, and the Army.
Enter López
Obrador, an unabashed left-wing politician who has built up a base of
national support through good old-fashioned grassroots campaigning over
the past twenty years. By any definition, he is an extraordinary
political figure. Born and raised in the state of Tabasco, a Gulf Coast
backwater, López Obrador is a curious blend. An unassuming man of simple
tastes and a reputation for personal austerity, he is also a published
historian with a half-dozen books to his name, and he’s a passionate
follower—and player—of baseball. On Sunday, at the age of sixty-four, he
has also become the most powerful person in Mexico, someone who
promises to end the country’s culture of corruption and to launch it
into a new era—what he calls the “fourth Mexican transformation.” The
first came with Mexico’s independence from Spanish colonial rule, in
1821; the second with Benito Juárez’s liberal reforms and his return to
power, after ousting the French-imposed Habsburg emperor Maximilian, in
the eighteen sixties; the third was the epochal and bloody Mexican
Revolution, in the early twentieth century. López Obrador promises that
his transformation will be a peaceful one.
With his triumph, López
Obrador ends an eighty-eight-year hold on Mexico’s political power by
two parties—the P.R.I., which ran the country from its founding, in
1929, until 2000, and the P.A.N., with whom it has alternated power ever
since. He also bucks the trend to the right that has swept Latin
America. Lately, the so-called Pink Tide of the Chávez era has collapsed
in country after country, replaced by a seemingly inexorable wave of
conservatism, which includes, as in the United States, its own share of
populists and demagogues. In Colombia’s most recent election, which took
place two weeks ago, the right-wing politician Iván Duque came first in
the polls over his left wing rival, Gustavo Petro. Duque’s victory was
largely based on instilling fear in the Colombian electorate that Petro,
a former guerrilla, was a kind of Trojan Horse for the “castrochavista” left of Venezuela and Cuba.
López Obrador’s rivals tried to brand him as a castrochavista
as well, but it never worked, and it didn’t stop his momentum. Although
a man of the left, López Obrador demonstrated his pragmatism during a
stint, between 2000 and 2005, as the mayor of Mexico City, where he
worked with ideological adversaries to get things done. A case in point
was his alliance with the Mexican telecom magnate Carlos Slim, with whom
he formed a public-private business partnership that brought life—and
people—back to the neglected and crime-ridden historic city center.
During his Presidential campaign, he also made huge efforts to reach out
to his traditional foes in the private-sector business élite, who fear
that López Obrador is a socialist in sheep’s clothing. This all-powerful
cabal of Mexican empresarios has been crucial in keeping him
out of power in the past. Almost everyone in Mexico agrees that, in the
2006 election, for instance, when López Obrador lost by less than a half
of one per cent of the vote to his P.A.N. rival, Felipe Calderón, it
was fraud, aided and abetted by the private sector. (Whether or not
fraud was the determining factor in his loss in the 2012 election is
less clear-cut.)
López Obrador’s celebrated his victory on Sunday
night like a rock star, showered with confetti and hailed with ecstatic
applause and cheers on a stage in front of a huge crowd that had
gathered in the Zócalo, the vast public square outside the Presidential
palace where the Aztecs once maintained their seat of power. The
moment was not only a personal victory for López Obrador but a victory
to the countless ordinary Mexicans who voted for him, many of whom have
always felt excluded from the political life of the country. They
include those who come from the atomized indigenous and agrarian
communities around the country that are overrun with narcos, those who
emigrate en masse to work in potato fields, and busboys and cooks living
in the United States. At a time when the nation’s morale is at an
all-time low, not least because of Trump’s hurtful invective, but also
because of a broad sense among Mexicans that their own political culture
has failed them, López Obrador restores a measure of hope that Mexico
is a country worth being proud of. The expectations he has raised are
enormous, and he has not shied away from the prospect of raising them
further.
On Sunday night, López Obrador repeated the promise he
made many times on the campaign trail: “I will not fail you, I will not
disappoint you, and I will not betray the people.” He made it clear that
he also wishes to be a figure of unity, by issuing a call for Mexicans
to put aside their differences in national reconciliation, “because the
fatherland comes first.” In a hopeful sign, both his rivals conceded
quickly and congratulated him on his victory, as did Peña Nieto.
For a recent piece for the magazine, I accompanied López Obrador
on three separate campaign trips and had several conversations with
him. The main feeling I came away withwas that López Obrador has a
strong sense of historic purpose in what he is doing, and that he
genuinely believes in the ability of Mexicans to rise above their
circumstances with his help. Those who have compared his populism to
Trump’s are fundamentally mistaken, in my view; López Obrador’s populism
is built not on a hatred of “the other,” or on a need to prevail at the
expense of others, but rather on an intuitive faith that Mexicans can
overcome their current reality with a redeployment of their most
outstanding national traits—hard work, resourcefulness, pride, modesty,
and bravery.
There
is another difference between López Obrador and Trump. With Trump,
“America First” seems to involve an aggressive hunkering down and the
erection of a notional Fortress America that not only shows an
unfriendly face to the outside world but threatens to use its raw power
to impose its will. As the beleaguered southern neighbor of the U.S.,
Mexicans are especially vulnerable in the Trump era, and López Obrador
seems to understand that he needs to proceed with caution but also with
firmness. In the face of Trump’s proposed wall, dividing the two nations
further, López Obrador has proposed greater togetherness, and has said
he will establish a thirty-kilometre-wide free-trade zone along the
entire length of the Mexican-American border, with significantly reduced
taxes as an incentive for more American companies to come and do
business there. Trump proposes the expulsion of millions of Mexicans and
other “illegal aliens”; López Obrador has countered with calls for a
series of F.D.R.-style make-work projects that involve tree-planting and
various infrastructure programs to encourage Mexican workers to stay at
home.
López Obrador was renowned in the past for having a hot
temper, but he has learned to keep his true feelings in check. Nowadays,
he says a great deal with his eyes, and sometimes with a smile or a
pointed look. In one of our conversations, he quipped, “We have had some
bizarre characters in Mexico, but Donald Trump?” He opened his eyes
wide, shot me a theatrical smile, and hit the table with both his hands.
But,
for most Mexicans, Donald Trump is the monster who lives in the cave on
the mountain above, a fact of life that they can do little about. They
do not expect Andrés Manuel López Obrador to change that, but to make
their lives more bearable, perhaps, with the grand gesture of his
presence on their national stage. At home, what they most want him to do
is what he has promised them over and over on the campaign trail—to end
Mexico’s corruption. As Carmen Aristeguí, the doyenne of Mexican
investigative journalists, wrote me to say recently, “The goal of Andrés
Manuel López Obrador is to pass into history, nothing more and nothing
less; to be remembered like the founding fathers were. One does not
expect Andrés Manuel to be just another manager of the chaos. One hopes
that he will direct the country towards a new logic of political power,
and of citizenship, that will allow the dismantling of deeply-rooted
structures and practices that have always dominated Mexico. If Andrés
Manuel manages to eradicate the systemic corruption in Mexico and
doesn’t do anything else during his time in government, that will be
reason enough to raise a statue to him and to tell his story in all the
primary school books.”
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