López Obrador, Trump, and the error of comparison

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 PAN 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 PRI, which ran the country from its founding, in 1929, until 2000, and the PAN, 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 Hugo 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 PAN 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 with was 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.