https://newleftreview.org/issues/ii147/articles/tony-wood-mexico-in-flux
Birth of a New Party System

While the outcome of Mexico’s presidential election on 2 June came as little surprise, the scale of it was startling.footnote1 Claudia Sheinbaum, the former governor of Mexico City, had been the frontrunner even before she was formally named the candidate of a coalition between the ruling National Regeneration Movement (Movimiento de Regeneración Nacional, Morena), the Green Party (Partido Verde Ecologista de México, pvem) and the Worker’s Party (Partido del Trabajo, pt). But while most polls in the lead-up to the vote projected her winning by a solid margin, there was little hint of the landslide to come. Sheinbaum scored 60 per cent, garnering just under 36 million votes, while her nearest rival, Xóchitl Gálvez, candidate of a three-party coalition between the National Action Party (Partido Acción Nacional, pan), the Institutional Revolutionary Party (Partido Revolucionario Institucional, pri), and the Party of the Democratic Revolution (Partido de la Revolución Democrática, prd), scored 27 per cent; Jorge Álvarez Máynez of the Citizens’ Movement (Movimiento Ciudadano, mc) came a distant third with 10 per cent.

Sheinbaum’s victory is even more impressive when broken down geographically and sociologically. Mexico is a tremendously diverse country, with marked demographic, socio-economic and cultural differences between regions. Since the advent of competitive elections in the 1990s, these have tended to produce a variegated political map. But Sheinbaum not only won all of Mexico’s 32 states except one (tiny Aguascalientes); she did so by more than 20 per cent in 25 cases, and by more than 40 per cent in 14.footnote2 She performed especially well in the country’s poorer south, pulling in more than 70 per cent of the vote in Chiapas, Guerrero, Oaxaca, Tabasco and Quintana Roo. But she also won Guanajuato and Jalisco, the heartland of Mexican conservatism, as well as Mexico State, long a crucial base for the pri, and Nuevo León, bastion of the country’s northern business elites. Exit polls suggest Sheinbaum’s support also had a striking sociological breadth: she seems to have won a clear majority in every age cohort and of almost every level of education, and had a crushing 50-point lead among those who identified as ‘lower class’. Even among the ‘middle class’, whom the opposition had clearly expected to rally to its side, Sheinbaum was ahead by 30 points.footnote3
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More than a victory, this was a political show of force. Yet it was not entirely unprecedented: in 2018, Sheinbaum’s predecessor, Andrés Manuel López Obrador—universally known by the initials amlo—won in similarly crushing fashion, by 53 per cent to his nearest rival’s 22, and he likewise swept the map (the only state he didn’t win was Guanajuato). At the time, the 2018 result was seen as a political earthquake, and it sent establishment pundits into a tailspin. Sheinbaum’s victory confirms that the systemic shock López Obrador delivered six years ago was no fluke, but rather marked the start of a new period in Mexico’s political history. It also poses once more an analytical challenge most commentary in the Anglosphere has been ill equipped to meet: how to explain the enduring popularity of amlo himself and the sustained success of Morena as a national project for power?

The interpretative task is scarcely made easier by the polarization of views on López Obrador and the pervasive tendency for discussions to focus on his persona. According to his critics—massively over-represented both in the Mexican media and Anglo outlets—amlo has taken the country to the brink of disaster, undermining its institutions, coarsening political discourse and spreading misinformation. For his supporters—far less visible in the Mexican media, and almost totally ignored outside it—he has mounted a long-overdue challenge to the privileges of a small elite, and has improved living standards for the majority of the population while beginning to tackle the scourge of corruption. To judge by most coverage in Mexico and outside it, López Obrador leaves office under a cloud of unprecedented discontent. Yet he has consistently had the highest approval rating of any Mexican president since the return of competitive elections, and when those who voted for his successor were asked their reasons for doing so, huge majorities cited a desire to maintain his policies.footnote4

If Sheinbaum’s election represents a validation of amlo’s legacy, understanding what comes next for Mexico partly depends on what we take that legacy to be. López Obrador came to power in 2018 promising a ‘Fourth Transformation’, a period of national renewal comparable to three historic upheavals that remade the country: the struggle for independence from Spain in 1810–21; the mid-nineteenth-century liberal reforms under Benito Juárez; and the Mexican Revolution of 1910–20. Both López Obrador’s supporters and his critics refer to this ambitious project as ‘the 4T’—the difference lying in the tone with which they do so. Nothing quite so grandiose has taken place during his sexenio, but there can be little doubt that Mexico’s political topography has shifted dramatically, nor that he and Morena have played an active role in that process. This makes it especially important to get a clearer picture of the nature of amlo’s and Morena’s project, as well as of his administration’s actual record, in order to then assess the likely trajectories open to his successor. Ctd....