Candidate for mayor of Mexico City Santiago Taboada recently quoted Chilean poet Pablo Neruda on social media: “They can cut all the flowers, but they won't be able to stop spring.” It was a blow to Mexico's outgoing president, Andrés Manuel López Obrador, known as AMLO, and his Morena party. Party members had been seen removing Taboada campaign leaflets in the Mexico City Metro and replacing them with ads for their own candidates.
That a conservative politician quoted a communist writer was a sign of a dramatic shift in Latin American politics: the left-right dichotomy of the Cold War era has given way to a struggle between populist authoritarians and “conservatives,” which are now They tend to cover all significant aspects. opposition, liberal or conservative.
on Sunday decisive victory of AMLO's chosen successor, the former mayor of Mexico City, Claudia Sheinbaum, over the opposition candidate Xóchitl Gálvez promises to continue the president's “socialist” agenda. But if Sheinbaum's tendency to stretch the truth is any indication, she will be as eager as her predecessor to employ the “three Ps” (populism, polarization, and post-truth) to consolidate power and further degrade Mexico's democracy.
The Venezuelan journalist Moisés Naím identified the three Ps as the standard manual for 21st century autocrats. Today's would-be authoritarians are less likely than those of the 20th century to present themselves as right-wing strongmen, using violence and repression to seize power. Rather, they come to power through traditional elections, cloaking their campaigns in the rhetoric of democracy while using divisive rhetoric to galvanize support. Once in power, they destroy or subjugate the institutions that could control them, allowing them to govern as they wish.
Much has been said about Mexico democratic decline under AMLO. Instead of creating social programs, he has used populist tactics like yours. daily propaganda program obfuscate and polarize. He has also courted Mexico's poor with regular monetary donations and increased the minimum wage, which was one of his most constructive achievements.
Despite AMLO's constant criticism of “neoliberals” (code for the United States), it is under his rule that Mexico's democracy and social prosperity have declined.
AMLO's pension program essentially steals from Mexico's youth for political convenience, taking money from the pension funds of hard-working Mexicans to allow immediate payments to the elderly, increasing its popularity.
The sociologist Máximo Ernesto Jaramillo-Molina found that from 2018 to 2022, Mexico's spending on social programs as a proportion of gross domestic product increased only 0.7%, to 4.7%. That's less than during the first three years of the administration of López Obrador's predecessor, Enrique Peña Nieto, or the first four years of the previous presidency, that of Felipe Calderón. Under AMLO, The Economist wrote, “the social policy of the federal government… stopped privileging the poor and ended up benefiting the richest households in the country.”
The Mexican president has also given unprecedented power to a loyal party military. The attempt disappear National Electoral Institute of the country, transferring electoral supervision to the judiciary. And raised a political ally without judicial experience to the Supreme Court.
AMLO also effectively ended the Mérida Initiative, the vast joint U.S.-Mexico-Central American anti-drug program that sought to counter organized crime and strengthen the rule of law. His policy on cartels, “hugs, not bullets”, is effectively a non-politics. Despite his recent claim that homicides had decreased by 20% during his presidency, a government security agency found that more than 171,000 homicides had occurred during his tenure, more than any previous administration.
Mexico has elected its first female president, a historic event that should be cause for celebration. But I fear that AMLO's protégé is too immersed in Morena's methodology to make real progress for Mexico.
In the most recent presidential debate, for example, Sheinbaum claimed that homicides had decreased by 58% during his mayoralty, when in fact they had decreased. increased 9%.
Sheinbaum, a graduate in environmental sciences, sometimes speaks like a committed environmentalist; she said The Associated Press She supports renewable energy. But she also promised to increase generation from state power plants that rely on fossil fuels. As the only G-20 country without a net-zero emissions plan, Mexico needs a climate change leader, not a labyrinth of empty words.
Born into an elite family with a history of financial opacity, Sheinbaum falsely denied involvement in the Panama Documents scandal, betraying his penchant for post-truthor post-truth. The investigation revealed that six of Sheinbaum's relatives, including her mother, hid millions in offshore tax havens.
In short, Mexico's populists are not friends of their people. Sheinbaum's election means that we are still waiting for the arrival of the democratic spring in Mexico.
Kristina Foltz is a Rotary fellow who writes about populism and misinformation in Latin America.
