President Vs. Protesters: How Populist Leader López Obrador Reforms Mexico – Analysis
Mexico's Andrés Manuel López Obrador (AMLO). Photo Credit: Eneas De Troya, https://www.flickr.com/photos/eneas/7479516188
Recently, Mexico has been a “case state” in the Western mainstream media because it has become the scene of protests against the current president Andrés Manuel López Obrador (AMLO).
The protests arose as a reaction to the reform of the electoral law with an emphasis on the National Electoral Institute (Instituto Nacional Electoral – INE), the public body that oversees the conduct of elections for the president, parliament, federal state bodies and local authorities. Hundreds of thousands of protesters took to the streets in more than 100 cities dressed in the pink and white colors of the electoral institute.
Opponents of the government consider the reforms to be unconstitutional and designed to make election monitoring less effective, while also making it more difficult to vote in more remote areas. The new constitutional law was adopted by the Mexican Senate on February 22 with 72 votes in favor and 50 against. It includes amendments to the General Law on Electoral Institutions, the Law on Political Parties and the Law on Justice.
Electoral reform
INE is considered particularly important in Mexico, where the legality of elections has often been questioned due to a lack of transparency and a tendency to rig results. It is important to know that the United Mexican States (the official name of the country) was under the control of an authoritarian regime led by the Institutional Revolutionary Party (PRI) between 1929 and 2000. During this period, elections were held but were characterized by fraud. The PRI controlled the presidency from 1929 to 2000 and most other institutions until the late 1980s. This is precisely why the establishment of an independent body to manage Mexico’s electoral system in 1990 was crucial to the democratic transition. Due to the fear of repeated electoral fraud, some Mexicans are afraid of the current reforms. Mexico has a federal system that includes 31 states, the capital (Ciudad de México) and 2,454 municipalities.
López Obrador justifies the electoral reforms with the need to reduce high costs: elections in Mexico are one of the most expensive in the world. The president has long rightly criticized the INE for its huge and inefficient bureaucracy and the high salaries of its officials. The body’s management salaries average $13,000 a month (plus various benefits), while most Mexican workers earn between $200 and $400 a month. AMLO called them a gilded bureaucracy because, for example, the head of INA, Lorenzo Córdova, earns twice as much as the president. Despite the media hype, reform of that body is necessary.
The constitutional law facilitates voting rights for people with disabilities, people in pre-trial detention and millions of immigrants living abroad. It foresees stricter sanctions for the widespread practice of vote buying. The law regulates the inclusion of minorities and members of vulnerable groups in electoral lists. Establishes a commission to study the application of electronic voting. And, in light of a series of incidents where the INE has tried to ban people from running for office for innocuous actions such as tweeting, the law reduces its ability to arbitrarily interfere with citizens’ political rights.
The sovereign rule of the left in Mexico
The current protests against electoral reforms must be understood in the context of the weakening influence of the opposition in the country. During Mexico’s neoliberal period, the government was entirely at the service of the wealthy elite. With AMLO’s victory in the 2018 elections, that changed. Gone are the days when a small elite could hold all the levers of power.
AMLO and his left-wing party MORENA have complete dominance in the country. Not only did they convincingly win the 2018 presidential elections, but they also won a majority in Congress and formed the first left-wing government in Mexico’s modern history. Since 2018, MORENA and its coalition partners have recorded only successes. Although MORENA and her left-wing coalition, called Together We Make History (Juntos Hacemos Historia), lost a two-thirds majority in the lower Mexican parliament (Chamber of Deputies) in the parliamentary elections in June 2021, they profited when it came to governors, mayors and local authorities. In the new round of voting for governors in June 2022, MORENA won four out of six states. With these victories and with partners, MORENA controls the governorships in 22 of the 32 states.
The political opposition in Mexico is currently led by the Institutional Revolutionary Party (PRI) and the National Action Party (PAN), which cannot accept the political reality according to which the anti-establishment party dominates. This is not surprising since the two parties alternately ruled the country for more than a century. Faced with an electorate that continues to support the leftist government, opposition parties are trying to maintain their influence within formally independent bodies of the Mexican state such as the INE. In the past, that body allowed the PAN candidate, Felipe Calderón, to win the presidency in the July 2006 election, which Mexican society considered fraught with irregularities. And then AMLO competed in the elections and lost the victory by only 250 thousand votes.
The dysfunctional National Electoral Institute
Despite strong evidence of election manipulation, the National Electoral Institute saw nothing objectionable. AMLO refused to recognize the results and claimed that the elections were rigged. Mexico went through a serious political crisis for the rest of the year as López Obrador declared himself the “legitimate president” and called for protests across the country that were noisy and widespread for months.
The country was on the brink of civil war, and in order to gain the support of the people, Calderón launched a war against the drug cartels ten days after his inauguration, on December 10. Although he had a bad experience in the past, in the first years of his mandate, AMLO did not seek to reform the INE. Only in 2021 (when that body canceled the registration of two of his gubernatorial candidates) did he turn his attention to that electoral body.
Félix Salgado Macedonio in the state of Guerrero and Raúl Morón Orozco in the state of Michoacan were denied the opportunity to participate due to minor violations of the electoral law. Leftists considered such a decision politically motivated, designed to reduce the party’s prospects. The president’s supporters considered this decision by the INE unfair, especially when taking into account the electoral irregularities during the victory of the PRI party in the state of Mexico in 2017. It was not until 2021 that the president began to consider electoral reforms.
Contrary to the image portrayed by the opposition and the Western media, nothing in the electoral reform would undermine the country’s democracy or the autonomy of the bodies that oversee the elections. So called. “defending INE” became the rallying cry of the opposition and civil society associations close to it, such as Mexicans against corruption and Alternative for Mexico. It is well known that the leaders of these associations were close to the former governments led by the PRI and PAN parties.
Waves of protest
After the presentation of the constitutional reform, the opposition organized a large protest in the capital Ciudad de México on November 13, 2022. The organizers of the protest tried to present the event as a non-partisan initiative, because only one speaker, the former president of INA, José Woldenberg, addressed the crowd. In response, López Obrador called his supporters to counter-protests.
If the opposition felt good after the successfully held rally, pro-government protests soon after spoiled its mood. An estimated 1.2 million people responded to the call to show support for the president at the Nov. 27 rally. Protesters waited on the red-hot asphalt of the Promenade de la Reforma (Paseo de la Reforma) in the capital to briefly see and greet the president who moved along the entire avenue to finally address the crowd in the city’s main Zócalo square.
At the end of February of this year, the opposition held a new large rally in the capital to oppose the reforms. The rally was held in the shadow of the recent conviction of a once-powerful politician, Genaro García Luna, an official in both PAN governments (2000-2012) who was convicted in a New York court of involvement in drug trafficking and ties to the Sinaloa drug cartel. The party leadership has tried to distance itself from him, but since García Luna was secretary of public security during Calderón’s tenure when violent crime rose dramatically, the public is unlikely to believe that the rest of the party knew nothing. A recent February poll showed that 84% of Mexicans want to see former President Calderón investigated for his alleged ties to organized crime.
Protests – the work of the right and the USA
In his regular address to the public, the president linked the group of opposition with the influential business elite, stating that before they were in power, they formed a “narco-state” full of corruption and crime. According to AMLO and his supporters, the real threat to democracy in the country is the opposition and the business elite that supports it. The United States, which recently stated that it criticized the electoral reform, should definitely be added here. AMLO harshly snapped at the State Department that the US always interferes in “things that don’t concern them” and that “Mexico currently has more democracy than the United States.”
Labeling a leftist president as a threat to the entire country and its democracy is a classic strategy of the right and the US in Latin America. If a left-wing candidate wins the next presidential election in 2024 (in which AMLO cannot run because the Mexican Constitution does not allow presidents to serve more than one term), it is to be expected that the right and Washington will accuse the Mexican government of the illegality of the election. It’s possible that USA and its partners will not recognize the election and the new president. They will declare another candidate as the legitimate president of Mexico. This is a strategy that the Americans have been using in the region for decades. The most famous infamous example in recent years happened with the recognition of Juan Guaido as the “legitimate president” of Venezuela, only to have that recognition later fall into oblivion thanks to Guaido’s political sluggishness.
Diplomatic war with Peru
The Mexican president said that instead of commenting on Mexico, Washington should “deal with what is happening in Peru.” He condemned what he called US support for “conspirators who trampled on freedoms and democracy in that country”. López Obrador was an ardent supporter of former leftist Peruvian President Pedro Castillo, who was ousted by Congress in December 2022 after he tried to dissolve the body and rule by decree. He was replaced by his vice president, Dina Boluarte. Boluarte, who has faced massive (pro-Castillo) protests in the past few months that have resulted in the deaths of around 70 people, accused López Obrador of “unacceptable” interference in her country’s affairs.
In December, Washington recognized Boluarte’s government. Unlike the Americans, some Latin American countries such as Mexico, Argentina, Bolivia, Colombia, Venezuela, Honduras still recognize that Castillo is the democratically elected president of Peru and that he is the victim of an illegal right-wing coup.
In recent weeks, Peru and Mexico have further strained relations, and the highlight was the withdrawal of the Peruvian ambassador from Ciudad de México at the end of February, while the Mexican ambassador to Peru was declared persona non grata. The Mexican president granted asylum to Castillo’s family and said he was a victim of a coup. AMLO met with Castillo’s wife, Lilia Paredes, at Mexico’s National Palace (the president’s residence) and called Boluarte a “fake president,” saying he had seen polls showing she only had 15% support.
López Obrador’s most powerful move was his refusal to transfer the presidency of the regional trade organization, the Pacific Alliance, to Peru, which also includes Colombia and Chile. Nevertheless, at the beginning of March, diplomatic relations between Ciudad de México and Lima were still not severed.
Teflon-president
Next year in July, Mexicans will vote in general elections for the president, 500 members of the Chamber of Deputies, 128 members of the Senate, nine governors and representatives in 30 states. The process will require 150,000 polling stations across the country. Despite the well-attended anti-government protests recently, it’s unlikely that the opposition will succeed in translating its mobilization into electoral victories.
AMLO remains incredibly popular, and his party’s prospects in the 2024 elections are considered extremely good. Since he began his six-year term in December 2018, Andrés Manuel López Obrador has been rightly described as a “Teflon president” who can’t be harmed by anything. Although Mexico faces high rates of violence, according to all polls, AMLO has an approval rating around a 60%. This is due to the personal charisma of the unique president, but also to the good results. Although a detailed consideration of the policies of the controversial president would require several articles, the most important recent results can be summarized.
Achievements on the domestic front
López Obrador celebrated four years in power at the end of November 2022. On that occasion, 1.2 million of his ardent fans arrived in the capital for the mentioned pro-government gathering. Then, in his 90-minute speech, the leftist president mentioned the achievements of his government and concluded the speech by calling his political philosophy “Mexican humanism”. The results are really good. Economic growth is exceeding forecasts and during 2022 Mexico’s GDP grew by about 3%, foreign direct investment increased by 29.5%, while external debt was reduced to 47% of GDP.
During 2022, the Mexican peso was among the strongest currencies against the US dollar. While currencies such as the euro, the British pound, the Chilean peso and the Colombian peso fell against the dollar, the Mexican currency is the third best performer in the past year, with a positive variation of 3.82%. The Mexican peso is behind the Russian ruble (17.61%) and the Brazilian real (8.29%), which puts it in second place in Latin America. Factors that have helped the Mexican currency are the inflow of remittances from abroad, the inflow of foreign currencies from Mexican exports, and foreign direct investment. Unemployment in the country is falling despite the rise in interest rates. At the end of last year, the unemployment rate was only 3%, which is the lowest level since 2005.
AMLO came to power thanks to a promise to redistribute wealth between the rich and the poor. And there are impressive successes in this. Last year, it raised the minimum wage by 20% ($207.44) as a continuation of efforts to improve working conditions. By the end of his term, the minimum wage is expected to double. In addition, the minimum number of days of paid annual leave has been doubled from 6 to 12 days (while the maximum is 32 days depending on years of service).
In April of last year, the President nationalized lithium stores, which are among the largest in the world, within the framework of the Law on the Electrical Industry (recently, lithium reserves were also nationalized). Public control over the country’s electricity grid has also been increased. In that same month, AMLO convincingly won the first Mexican referendum on the impeachment of the president. Turnout was only 17%, and the president won with just over 93% of the vote. During his campaign in 2018, AMLO promised to hold such a referendum during the middle of his mandate, and that was what the opposition, which suffered a bitter defeat, demanded.
Active foreign policy
Although he has made important strides at home, López Obrador is most recognized in the international community for his active foreign policy that promotes neutrality and multipolarity. In May 2022, AMLO warned that he would refuse to attend the 9th Summit of the Americas in Los Angeles if all Latin American countries were not represented. There was pressure from Washington in the following weeks, but the Mexican president kept his promise and only sent an envoy.
Other leaders followed his line of resistance to US exclusiveness, such as Honduran President Xiomara Castro, Bolivian President Luis Arce, El Salvadoran President Nayib Bukele, and Saint Vincent and the Grenadines Prime Minister Ralph Gonsalves. Cuban President Miguel Díaz-Canel and Nicaraguan President Daniel Ortega said they would not attend the summit even if invited.
In his speech on Mexico’s Independence Day on September 16, AMLO took a neutral stance on the war in Ukraine, criticizing the ineffectiveness of the United Nations and the suffering caused by both sanctions and arms shipments. The suspicion cannot be avoided, he concluded, “that the war was fueled by the interests of the arms industry”. That same month, the Mexican president broke Venezuela’s diplomatic blockade by inviting President Nicolás Maduro to the CELAC (Community of Latin American and Caribbean States) summit in Mexico. He proposed that the Organization of American States (OAS) be replaced by CELAC, an organization that does not include the US and Canada. His proposal came in support of the demands of countries such as Nicaragua, Venezuela and Bolivia, which consider the OAS an interventionist instrument of the US.
Although López Obrador ignores the new Peruvian government, he leads a very active foreign policy in the region in early 2023. After a meeting with US President Joseph Biden and Canadian Prime Minister Justin Trudeau at the so-called at the “Three-Amigos” conference in January, AMLO is interested in stronger economic relations with colleagues from the region.
At the end of February, together with the presidents of Argentina (Alberto Fernandez), Brazil (Luiz Inácio Lula Da Silva), Colombia (Gustavo Petro) and Cuba (Díaz-Canel), he launched an initiative to combat inflation. Although he didn’t attend the CELAC summit in January in Buenos Aires, he continued with his plan to approach Latin America through a regional anti-inflation agreement. The Mexican president wants to meet with his colleagues in Ciudad de México in April with this goal in mind.
Surprisingly, Maduro was not invited despite his ideological closeness to other leaders. The anti-inflation deal would consist of a product exchange program to curb escalation of prices. The agreement would introduce favorable conditions for the import of goods that affect growth of prices. Technical teams from the five countries should adjust the scope of such an agreement to reduce the impact of rising prices on basic foodstuffs. Organizing his own summit will give the Mexican president the opportunity to assert himself as the new leader of the region, which he certainly intends to become.