Andrés Manuel López Obrador

Andrés Manuel López Obrador (born November 13, 1953, Villa de Tepetitán, Tabasco, Mexico) centre-left populist Mexican politician who was elected president of Mexico in July 2018. Previously he served as head of the Federal District government (2000–05) and ran unsuccessfully for president in 2006 and 2012.

Early life and political career

López Obrador was born into a provincial middle-class family. From 1972 to 1976 he studied political science and public administration at the National Autonomous University of Mexico. He began his political career in Mexico’s long-ruling Institutional Revolutionary Party (PRI), eventually becoming Tabasco state party president in 1983. He left the party, however, and backed the dissident presidential candidacy of Cuauhtémoc Cárdenas in 1988. López Obrador’s own 1988 opposition candidacy for Tabasco’s governorship ended in defeat, but he later became state president of the party founded on the basis of Cárdenas’s electoral coalition, the centre-left Party of the Democratic Revolution (PRD).

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During the 1990s López Obrador earned a national reputation for organizing grassroots protests against environmental damage in Tabasco caused by the state-owned Petróleos Mexicanos (Pemex) and electoral fraud committed by the “official” PRI (most notably involving the 1994 Tabasco gubernatorial race, which he lost to 2005–06 PRI presidential candidate Roberto Madrazo Pintado). From 1996 to 1999 López Obrador served as national president of the PRD, a position he used both to promote grassroots party organization and to recruit prominent PRI members as PRD mayoral and gubernatorial candidates. In 2000 he was elected head of the Federal District government, a post he held through July 2005, when he resigned to seek the PRD’s presidential nomination.

López Obrador compiled a generally successful record as head of Mexico City’s government. Under the slogan “For the good of all, the poor first,” he promoted a series of innovative social and cultural programs—including old-age pensions, financial support for single mothers and the unemployed, substantial investments in urban redevelopment and transportation infrastructure, and educational outreach programs—that won him widespread popularity. Nevertheless, his record was marred by sensational corruption scandals involving several close subordinates, and public security remained a major challenge.

In May 2004 the federal attorney general initiated impeachment proceedings against López Obrador, charging him with having defied a court order by authorizing the construction of a hospital access road across private property. Mexican Pres. Vicente Fox argued that his administration sought only to uphold the rule of law, but many national and international observers believed that the underlying motive was to disqualify López Obrador as a presidential candidate. After nearly one million protesters marched through downtown Mexico City in April 2005, Fox finally ended the prolonged confrontation by dropping the impeachment charge.

Pursuit of the presidency

Early polls placed López Obrador far ahead of Fox’s protégé Felipe Calderón, but, by the date of the presidential election in July 2006, those numbers were diminished by a strong Calderón media campaign. Initial results had the two candidates in a virtual dead heat, and Calderón emerged the victor by a mere 0.56 percent of the vote. Almost immediately, tens of thousands of López Obrador supporters took to the streets to demand a recount. A partial recount failed to change the results, however, and Calderón was officially declared the winner. In response, López Obrador held a massive public ceremony in the Zócalo, Mexico City’s main square, to inaugurate himself as the “legitimate president” of a parallel government.

In 2012 López Obrador ran again as the PRD’s candidate for the presidency. This time, according to preliminary results, he finished second to the PRI’s Enrique Peña Nieto, the handsome former governor of the state of México, though López Obrador did finish ahead of the National Action Party (PAN) candidate, former cabinet minister Josefina Vázquez Mota. Almost immediately López Obrador alleged that there had been violations of election law by the PRI, including overspending in the campaign and vote buying. In response to the allegations, the Federal Electoral Institute ordered a recount of more than half of Mexico’s polling places, which upheld Peña Nieto’s victory.

Disenchanted with the PRD’s support for Peña Nieto’s economic initiatives, in 2014 López Obrador founded a new political party, the National Regeneration Movement (Movimiento Regeneración Nacional; MORENA). As the 2018 presidential election approached, López Obrador staked out a position as the party’s de facto standard bearer, trumpeting his own integrity as a bulwark against political corruption. Ever the populist and nationalist, he continued to emphasize his opposition to the North American Free Trade Agreement (NAFTA) and Peña Nieto’s decision to open up Mexico’s energy industry to private investment.

The third time proved to be the charm for López Obrador: he swept to a landslide victory in the 2018 presidential election, besting Ricardo Anaya Cortés of the PAN, José Antonio Meade, the technocratic candidate of the PRI, and independent Jaime Rodríguez Caldéron, all of whom conceded defeat within two hours of the closing of the polls on July 1. López Obrador’s election marked the first time in nearly 90 years that the Mexican president had not been elected from either the PRI or the PAN. Although López Obrador had tacked somewhat toward the ideological centre in his campaign, his message remained focused on narrowing his country’s wealth gap, improving the lives of its poorest citizens, reducing the violence that had resulted in the highest annual murder total in two decades in 2017, and eradicating the corruption that was endemic in Mexican society. More than any other issue, the last goal resonated with Mexican voters in what proved to be a “change” election. López Obrador pledged to use the billions that he claimed would be saved by eliminating corruption to fund ambitious social programs. Notwithstanding the undeniable popular mandate won by López Obrador, many observers were skeptical of whether he could succeed in eliminating corruption when so many before him had failed, and others questioned the utility of his combative leadership style,

López Obrador’s presidency

Once López Obrador was in office, there is little doubt that he attempted to cater to the interests of the country’s poorest citizens, the key constituents of his political base, with whom he remained immensely popular. His government instituted direct payments to tens of millions of Mexicans living below the poverty level, raised the minimum wage, and enacted labour reform, all in an attempt to level a playing field long tilted toward the wealthy and powerful. However, he proved to be more of a populist than a progressive, to the increasing disappointment of many of the younger voters who had played such a large role in his election. Moreover, much of the middle class rejected many of the policies of López Obrador, who positioned himself in fervent opposition to the country’s political and economic elites. In promising to oversee the “Fourth Transformation” of Mexican society (preceded, according to López Obrador, by independence [1810], the separation of church and state under La Reforma [1854–76], and the Mexican Revolution [1910]), the new president cast himself in the role of the country’s saviour, prompting some observers to brand him as a demagogue, especially after he began belittling political opponents, castigating independent journalists, and prevaricating at his daily morning press conferences.

Many on the left were particularly disappointed by his response to the country’s homicide epidemic. López Obrador had campaigned on reducing the crime-fighting role of the military, whose policing practices had resulted in a litany of civil rights abuses. However, only about one-fourth of the members of the newly created National Guard, which replaced the Federal Police in December 2019, had served in the police. The remainder consisted of military personnel who had been transferred from the army and navy. Moreover, when the National Guard—whose methods resulted in new allegations of civil rights violations—failed to stem the rising tide of violence and murder, López Obrador extended the policing powers of the regular military.

Another linchpin of López Obrador’s campaign was his promise to rescue the country’s energy industry, which had suffered badly as a result of diminishing reserves and declining world oil market prices, transforming Pemex into one of the world’s most-indebted oil companies. López Obrador laid the blame for these problems on the neoliberal economic policies of his predecessors and pledged to reverse the involvement in the industry by foreign private concerns that Peña Nieto had introduced. Many observers, however, felt that López Obrador’s plan to build a costly oil refinery in his home state was anything but the right solution to the industry’s woes, given that Mexican refineries were operating at only about 40 percent capacity and were losing money by producing at higher levels.

Mexico was especially hard-hit by the coronavirus SARS-CoV-2 pandemic that swept the globe in 2020 after cases of the virus were first reported in China in December 2019. In March 2020 the Mexican government instituted a two-month national lockdown in an attempt to stop the spread of the virus, which causes the potentially deadly disease COVID-19. However, the government stopped short of mandating compliance with measures recommended to curb the spread of the virus, such as mask wearing and social distancing. Hugo López-Gatell, tasked by López Obrador with overseeing the country’s response to the pandemic, argued that Mexicans, already resistant to authoritarian policing, would view strict imposition of pandemic protocols as repression. Moreover, the government did not widely test the population to monitor the spread of the virus. As a result, voluntary adherence to health guidelines was limited, and, though the spread of the disease plateaued in the summer, it began spiking again late in 2020. By November more than 100,000 Mexicans had perished from COVID-19-related causes, the world’s fourth highest national total.

López Obrador, who consistently downplayed the severity of the pandemic, showed open disdain for wearing a mask and practicing social distancing. In January 2021 he contracted COVID-19 himself. By the first months of that year, it was clear that his government’s approach to dealing with the pandemic had been a massive failure. By April the official count of COVID-19-related deaths in the country had reached about 210,000, though the health department acknowledged that, because of the paucity of testing, the actual total was probably closer to 330,000 deaths. In the meantime, Mexico’s GDP had shrunk by more than 8 percent in 2020, the largest single-year contraction for the country’s economy since 1932.

The June 2021 midterm elections were viewed by many observers as a referendum on López Obrador’s first three years in office. While the president had not succeeded in turning around the economy or reducing violence and crime, he remained popular with the disadvantaged Mexicans whose needs so many of his policies targeted. Nevertheless, the elections—which were marred by widespread violence, including the murders of nearly three dozen candidates during the campaign—yielded disappointing results for MORENA. Going into the elections, López Obrador’s party held an absolute majority in the Chamber of Deputies with more than 250 seats. Coming out, MORENA retained only 198 seats. However, MORENA’s principal partners in the ruling coalition, PVEM and the Labour Party, gained 32 and 9 seats, respectively, so, while the coalition saw its supermajority in the lower house of Congress disappear, it nonetheless held on to its majority.

In April 2022—still enjoying the approval of some three-fifths of Mexicans, according to opinion polling—López Obrador sought to renew his mandate by staging an unprecedented referendum on his presidency. Criticizing the costly recall vote as an empty exercise, many of López Obrador’s opponents called for a boycott of the vote. Ultimately, some 90 percent of those who participated voted to keep López Obrador in the presidency until the end of his term, though the result was moot because the turnout was well below the 40 percent of the electorate required to make the vote binding.