AMLO and Mexico's Historical Moment

I have just read an interesting discussion of AMLO (Andres Manuel Obrador Lopez) in the Mexican magazine Nexos by Hector Aquilar Camin, an important public intellectual in Mexico.  Aguilar is no ally of AMLO - he is a proponent of the neoliberal status quo in Mexico, which means reforming the reforms that Pena Nieto made in 2013 with the support of Mexico's three major political parties - the PRI, the PAN and the PRD.  

But political support for perfecting neoliberalism in Mexico is waning.  The latest opinion polls from the newspaper La Reforma give AMLO 52% while Ricardo Anaya (of the PAN/PRD alliance) has dropped to 26% and Jose Meade of the PRI has only 17% of the voters' preferences.  AMLO's party, Morena, is given by another prominent polling firm, Mitofsky, an 80% chance of winning control of the House of Deputies and a 30% change of winning control of the Senate. What seems set to occur in Mexico on July 1 is a massive realignment of political power as existing political parties take huge losses.  Pena Nieto's government (the PRI) has only 20% approval rating in Mexico.  The PRD has already been reduced, by the emergence of Morena, to junior a coalition partner of the PAN, its former ideological and political rival.  The PAN may also be reduced to what it has been historically, a regional political party with support in the Northern states of Mexico. 

The figure behind this massive wave of political change is AMLO.  Let us consider, then, some of the points that Aguilar raises about AMLO: 

1.  AMLO is an intemperate politician, with little disposition toward negotiation.  In this respect, he is different from the Mexican norm, which is characterized by the absence of politicians that exercise personal leadership outside the party and bureaucratic structures, and whose political capital disappears once they have lost their positions in government.  AMLO is a charismatic politician that can exercise power outside of the state apparatus.  The means for this is his political discourse.  Whereas Mexican political discourses is ceremonial language - rhetorical, technocratic and pompous - AMLO “speaks persuasively and creates political reality through what he says." 

2.  AMLO is willing to engage in mass mobilizations in order to assert his power.  This was the case in the wake of the 2006 election which he lost narrowly to Ferdinand Calderon.  AMLO claimed he lost because electoral fraud.  He had no evidence to back up this claim (contends Aguilar), which assumed a number of different forms, but nonetheless the capacity to make millions of his followers believe it.  

We can say that AMLO is a populist in the sense that he regards himself as an embodiment of the Mexican people and of Mexican history.  This is very different, of course, than the institutional character of the PRI, which is literally, the party of the revolution institutionalized.  The distinction to drawn here is between the power of a charismatic politician and that of a political apparatus.   

Of course the institutional revolution that the PRI could once claim to have embodied (during the middle decades of the 20th century) is long dead.  The people are no longer incorporated into the state, as in the PRIista vision of the institutionalized revolution; they have largely been expelled from the domain of the state as a result of Mexico's neo-liberal transformation after 1980.  The existence of the people as a collective subject outside the state means that they can be mobilized against the political class that dominates the state.  This is AMLO's project. 

3. AMLO's election will be a major political rupture with the past.  If he is not elected, he may create a political crisis for whoever wins.  At stake here is the continued existence of Mexico's political elite.  Will they do whatever it takes to maintain themselves in power?  This would include recourse to electoral fraud on a massive scale.  For his part, AMLO is trying to smooth his pathway to power.  He has maintained that existing office holders, in spite of being "a pack of thieves" would not face reprisals in the event that he is elected.  Nor would he attack the privileges of the business elite, even though he has characterized them as "a rapacious minority."  

AMLO does not want his election to provoke an economic crisis in Mexico.  But Aguilar is skeptical of these assurances because AMLO "is a politician above the institutional horizon that sustains and constrains others, a leader whose primary loyalty is to his causes and his particular conception of justice..."  In these respects, AMLO exists outside the framework of democratic negotiation.  

4.  AMLO has emerged at a moment when the neoliberal project in Mexico appears to be exhausted.  Neoliberalism - the economic paradigm embraced by Mexico since 1980 - has failed to fulfill its fundamental expectation of rapid economic growth.  Of course, this has been the case through Latin America.  Much of the rest of Latin America has already had its pink tide of leftist governments (from roughly 2000-2015) that have sought to reassert the role of the state in shaping development and by means redistributing the benefits of economic growth to the lower classes.  The global context for the pink tide consisted of higher commodity prices, which was the source of the wealth that left of center governments redistributed. 

2018 might be understood as Mexico's pink tide moment.  Aguilar formulates a starker view of Mexico's future:   AMLO may lead a movement to return to the pattern of inward development that Mexico followed until the early 1980s.  This would be a backward rather than forward looking course of action.  It would not be unprecedented though.  We have already witnessed the rejection of globalization with Brexit and the election of Trump in 2016.  AMLO is another point of political rupture with globalization.      

5.  In terms of Mexican history, the victory of AMLO would constitute a rupture with what Aguilar characterizes as the "PAN's peace" - this is the period of PAN rule in Mexico which coincided with high global oil prices and the PAN's fiscal policy of transferring oil resources to Mexico's state governments in order to reckon with political pluralism - a novel state of affairs given the PRI's 72 year control of the presidency and virtually the entire Mexican state.  This was the basis of corruption in Mexico, suggests Aquilar, "the decision to grease democracy with money."  

As opposed to what?  To pursue the virtuous path of neoliberalism?  Is the suggestion here that neoliberalism failed because of the temptations of democratic politics?  After this came Pena Nieto’s Pacto por Mexico, which advanced new reforms with respect to foreign investment in the oil sector and electrical utilities as well as sweeping educational, telecommunications, anti-monopoly, labor market and tax reforms.  The reforms themselves do not explain Pena Nieto’s unpopularity:  it is rather widespread instances of corruption, impunity and insecurity (tied to a growing wave of criminal violence) which have opened a new space for a dispute over the nation’s destiny.  Mexican citizens have had their fill of both the PAN and PRI.  They are ready to shake up the status quo – and AMLO, for now a majority of citizens – is their man.

6. AMLO’s campaign book and manifesto is entitled The Way Out:  Decadence and Rebirth of Mexico (La salida:  decadencia and renacimiento de Mexico).  The book mixes a stinging critique of the political status quo, dominated by “the mafia in power” with a utopian promise of redemption.  Once again, AMLO is not plotting vengeance against those he would displace in power, but rather a new beginning founded on “simple morality” and some “minor reforms.”  Corruption will be eliminated because AMLO is not corrupt.  Freed of the costs of corruption, the government will be able to invest another $25 billion a year in economic growth and social equity.  Private investment will kick in at an improbable ratio of $16 for every $1 of public spending.  This figure is based on the public/private partnerships that AMLO had developed during his tenure as the mayor of Mexico City.  

AMLO is promising not only growth, but happiness.  AMLO would terminate a reign of darkness and commence the rule of goodness.  Aguilar comments in this regard that AMLO is “reading something simple and profound in the emotions that dominate Mexican disenchantment” – people who believe in nothing want to believe in something by means of breaking with everything.     

7.  The transformation that AMLO proposes is rooted in Mexican history – or, more specifically, the idea of the people (el pueblo) as the subject of Mexican history.  Historically, the pueblo was  oppressed through colonization and imperialism, but they overcame this oppression through the leadership of Mexico’s great men – Benito Juarez in the 19^th century, Francisco Madero in Mexican Revolution and Lazaro Cardenas, who brought forth the major reforms of the Mexican revolution in the 1930s.  AMLO seeks to situate himself within this lineage as an historical redeemer of the nation – in his own words, “not just a man of the state, but a man of the nation.”  

The 2018 election is a matter of national destiny.  All of this can be summarized in the slogan of AMLO’s campaign:  “Together we will make history” (“Juntos haremos la historia”).  Aguilar wonders if AMLO really means this.  Is he a pragmatic politician using a redemptive political rhetoric as a means to power or does he believe his own rhetoric and thus sees himself as a savior of Mexico?

8.  We might consider here some of the parallels between Trump and AMLO.  They are both anti-systemic politicians.  AMLO is not a racist like Trump.  This is also not the popular mood in Mexico.  Still, the similarity here is that there is an exit (as the title of AMLO’s book implies) from the status quo, a desire “to leap beyond the rules of the game, to try out the promise of an anti-systemic change.”  Like Trump, there are those who say that AMLO will moderate himself in power and what, in any case, is there to lose:  the status quo in Mexico could hardly be any worse.  Moreover, the markets have already discounted the risks that AMLO poses to the Mexican economy.  And, finally, Mexico needs a good shake up.  

To these various attempts to rationalize the likely (but not certain) triumph of AMLO, Aguilar worries that an AMLO victory will be a destabilizing break with the status quo and even if things are bad, they can get a lot worse.  That they probably will, Aguilar contends, is on account of AMLO backward looking conception of the state as “un Estado rector” that governs everything.  AMLO will personify this new rector state and it will operate through confrontation rather than democratic negotiation, in large part because of how AMLO is convinced of his own righteousness.

9.  I have rather skeptical of Aguilar’s analysis. I don’t think that he shows that AMLO wants to take Mexico back to the mid-20^th century – the glory days of the PRI’s institutionalized revolution. Isn’t is more likely the Aguilar would initiate a pink tide style of governance similar, for example, to the rule of the Worker Party in Brazil under Lula and Dilma Rousseff.  In the case of Brazil, four straight electoral victories by the Workers Party did not undermine the power of the right or keep it from instigating a constitutional coup de etat against (i.e., a politically motivated impeachment) Rousseff in 2016.  The point here, of course, is that whatever change happens in Mexico in 2018 is not irreversible.

     

Aguilar does make some good points about AMLO’s personal style and how this election is occurring in the context of an almost complete collapse of legitimacy for the Mexican state.  Whatever doubts one may have about Aguilar’s discussion, one thing is clear:  a major power shift in Mexican politics with unknown consequences is imminent.