Who is AMLO?
Skipping over the usual biographical details, Andrés Manuel López Obrador (AMLO) is best understood as the platonic ideal of a popularist politician. He is a bizarre sort of ideologue, who reveres the icons of the Mexican state-building tradition but refuses to behave in any manner similar to theirs. Instead of the hard-edged anticlericalism and classical economics of the nineteenth century liberals, AMLO embraces Christianity and roots for capital’s weakening. Instead of the expansive vision of the State that characterized the victors of the Mexican Revolution, he mantains an ambivalent attitude towards the bureaucracy and the traditional government channels for economic regulation and resource distribution.
In other words, he shares many of the illusions and delusions of the average voter, who instinctively dislikes bureaucrats and capitalists and subscribes, at least vaguely, to Christian mores. Before AMLO got in power, many of his ideas were championed by people all over the political spectrum: I distinctly recall right-wing populist types calling for the abandonment of the Texcoco Airport proyect before Obrador claimed this idea for his coalition. The cancellation of the airport only became universally regarded as idiotic among them once it became associated with the president. The same is true for NAFTA (T-MEC) skepticism, the geographical dispersion of federal secretariats, opposition to market reforms, opposition to high salaries in the upper bureaucracy, support for the state-owned oil company, etc.
Who will succeed AMLO?
AMLO’s ideas have served the party well, but the party will not serve his ideas well. At the end of the day, Morena’s status as a left-wing party isn’t much disputed, even considering the president’s idiosyncratic ideology. If you have left-wing beliefs, his party is still place to go, especially since the rest of the political scene is organizing into a large anti-Morena coalition. Needless to say, the cadres being produced are very different from the president. In other words, the clock is ticking for Obrador’s distinct governing style. Edwin F. Ackerman writes that, despite AMLO’s moderation, state legislatures controlled by Morena are the most socially liberal in the country. How could it be otherwise? While the president retains his vote-winning ideological incoherence, his party is very quickly adopting the contours of a normal left-wing party. This is why the party’s candidate for the 2024 presidential election is not another folksy old man, but a perfect representative of the Brahmin Left. Claudia Sheinbaum is an unmarried, childless, Jewish woman with a PhD and all the charisma of a plate of mashed potatoes. Talking about the party’s future, AMLO 2.0 is definitely not on the cards. What might be?
The metamorphoses
Morena conquered power by winning an incredible 53% of the votes in the 2018 presidential election. This is a broad coalition, especially for a political system as fractured as the Mexican one. Despite the popular perception of AMLO as the candidate of the lower class, exit polls indicate that support for him was positively correlated with schooling and income. According to one of them, he won an astonishing 65% of the population with a university degree, while receiving 45% of the votes of those without any schooling.1 He won 64% of the population earning more than $15,171 MXN2 monthly, against a mere 44% of those with incomes of $785 MXN or less.3
This performance is explained by the fact that, for a moment, Obrador was everything for everyone. There was a very real effort to make the candidate palatable to the professional middle and upper classes and it paid off hansomely. His team managed to sanitize his image after the fiasco of the 2006 “legitimate government”4 and he managed to dominate the stage in a manner unthinkable during the 2012 presidential election. The accusations he would import some flavour of Latin American socialism did not stick and the good humour with which he dismissed some of the wilder allegations was taken by many as a sign of moderation. No longer held back by previously acquired stigmas, AMLO picked up the status of a respectable, well meaning outsider with worthwhile ideas, while every other actor belonged to an establishment that had clearly failed to pacify the country or boost growth. Crucially, his electorate only expanded; he still had a strong connection with the lower orders based, I think, on genuine sympathy and understanding of their plight and worldview, as well as years of constant touring and sheer charisma.
Given his current approval rating of 60%, there is little doubt AMLO would win another presidential election if the law allowed him more than one term, but the 2018 vote correlations no longer hold. While his overall support has increased, it is obvious he has alienated portions of the wealthier groups he had made inroads into. According to this poll, only around 30% of Mexican businessmen5 and professionals support the president, while 70% of peasants and university students, as well as 62% of informal workers, do. According to El Financiero, Mexico’s premier business newspaper, Morena’s lower chamber candidates went from receiving 48% of the votes from university graduates in 2018 to a mere 33% in the 2021 midterm election. At the same time, the party increased its share of the votes from elementary school graduates from 42% to 55%. A good graphical encapsulation of these trends is to be found in this map of party control at the Mexico City municipal level:
As I have written before, the east is significantly poorer than the west, which houses a significant middle and upper class population and the most important contingent of the Mexican intelligentsia. The shift is more striking if you take into account the natural advantage left-wing parties have in big urban areas; Mexico City is yet to a elect a mayor that does not hail from the lines of a left-wing party.
Morena has clearly become less hospitable for the wealthier voters Obrador managed to woo in 2018. The president has sidelined or eliminated moderating voices in his government. Carlos Urzúa, the first finance minister, a harmless economics professor of obvious social-democratic convictions, was the first to go. Alfonso Romo and Tatiana Clouthier, key links to the business class, followed. His nominations for key posts in the Mexican bureaucracy betray a radical streak, as he relies ever more heavily on characters from the academic hard left to staff the administration. His economic policymaking, while mindful of macroeconomic risks, has conceded nothing to the numerous center-right criticisms it’s been subject to. The president has cancelled the Texcoco airport, constructed a large refinery for the state-owned oil company, and dealt crucial blows to the neoliberal structural reforms enacted by the previous administration. Even rhetorically, AMLO has moved away from the 2018 template and gone on the offensive, directly accusing the middle class of single-minded aspirationism and excessive individualism.
A hegemonic party, if you can keep it
None of it seems to matter, for the president can rely on a very large, recently expanded, core of support in the Mexican proletariat and lumpenproletariat. While his personal style and policy decisions are increasingly hard to sell with upscale voters, vast segments of the populace have no reason to feel alienated. His government has overseen a major expansion of direct cash transfers and decent rates of economic growth, which, as far as I can tell, has been unusually quick to translate into material gains for the most impoverished segments of the population.
Voters associate Morena with AMLO, which means the party can expect a victory in the upcoming election. The president will win 2024 for Claudia Sheinbaum, but what routes does the party have without him? Mexico is not immune to international trends, political conflict has become and will become more centered on disagreements about values. Absent Obrador, the party will find it hard to pretend it’s anything other than the home of Mexico’s most radical left-wing culture warriors. Thus, the party will inevitably be subject to a weakening of its electoral base, due to the loss of its charismatic figure and more visibly radical cultural politics.
But AMLO’s 2023 coalition is not the only way to power, there’s also the 2018 route. Not only is it potentially highly effective, it is also, I think, more congenial to Sheinbaum, an ultimately typical example of a Mexico City Brahmin. She is not a communist revolutionary, she is a normal child of 1968. Unlike the president, she doesn’t care for Christianity, not even rhetorically. It is unlikely she feels a strong hatred of professional bureaucrats — much of her natural milieu consists of them. She cares for female empowerment and protecting sexual minorities; green energy is likely to excite her. She doesn’t care for openly confronting capital, the way AMLO has done, because she is too proper for that. Virtually all the experts agree that Mexico needs more private investment in its energy grid, and the Mexico City Brahmin usually heeds the call of the Expert Consensus.6 Under her leadership, the party will lose some working-class support, but there is no reason to think it can’t make up for it by appealing, again, to more upscale voters. Big-tent parties don’t tend to have very charismatic leaders, after all.
Under this scenario, Morena slowly morphs into a more normal social-democratic party, strong enough to protect Mexican democracy from the inevitable avalanche of right-wing populism.7 This is Morena slowly acquiring staatstragende party status.
However, if I am wrong and Sheinbaum really is a closet communist, Morena could also opt for further radicalization until it fades into irrelevance and/or stumbles into a macroeconomic crisis. This is the “Die Linke” scenario.
Either way, AMLO’s popularist dream can only end.
The combined shares of the center-left Partido Revolucionario Institucional (PRI) and center-right Partido Acción Nacional (PAN), reach 51% of the unschooled population. Note that it remains a popular idea among hardcore Mexican “anti-populist” types to restrict the franchise to those with higher education.
For reference, this figure is significantly higher than the decile average of all but the richest 10% of Mexicans.
Again, the combined shares of the establishment parties in this income bracket amount to 56%.
To be fair, there is a non-trivial chance the actual 2006 really was stolen for the PAN, but it is objectively true that the optics of his refusal to concede were terrible.
These are not cigar-chomping capitalists, obviously; most of them just own a microbusiness.
To be clear, this particular consensus is obviously correct.
Because we haven’t had our Bolsonaro, Trump or Millei and there’s plenty of appetite for that, believe me.