Andrés Manuel López Obrador has achieved a string of firsts with his resounding victory in Mexico’s elections. He is the only avowedly leftwing candidate to win an election for decades. He is the first anti-establishment politician from outside the mainstream to win the presidency in a century. To boot, his Morena party, founded only four years ago, will have the largest majority in Congress — and possibly the senate too — since Mexico’s transition to democracy 20 years ago. This should make Amlo, as he is popularly known, the most powerful president in more than a generation with the capacity to legislate his leftist nationalist agenda into reality and, should he chose, to unpick market-friendly policies favoured by his predecessors.
It is an open question — for which there will be no immediate answer, as he does not assume office until December — what exactly he will do with this mandate. His programme lacks detail, deliberately so. Mr López Obrador’s rivals have sought to portray him as a Mexican Hugo Chávez — a fiery authoritarian in the making who once in power will sacrifice the country’s reputation for fiscal prudence, and send the economy reeling with inflationary and populist policies. For all his pugnaciousness, his programme looks if anything more like Brazil’s Luiz Inácio Lula da Silva.
In the past he has advocated mass nationalisation. His 2018 campaign was markedly less radical, reflecting what may be a shift towards the centre ground. He has promised not to raise taxes immediately or increase debt, to respect the independence of the central bank, to eschew the expropriations he once favoured and respect the rule of law.