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July 18, 2018

Andrés Manuel López Obrador was elected to ‘transform’ Mexico. Can he do it?

Over 30 million Mexicans voted for Andrés Manuel López Obrador in the country’s July 1 presidential election, handing the former Mexico City mayor a landslide victory over three opponents with 53 percent of the vote.

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López Obrador’s agenda – to , , rethink Mexico’s , and in impoverished areas – is ambitious in this traditionally conservative Latin American nation.

López Obrador has run for president twice on a similar platform, in and . He lost both times.

To win this year, López Obrador’s young Morena party joined forces with several smaller parties from both right and left to build a triumphant but strange electoral coalition called “,” or Together We’ll Make History.

The people now charged with turning López Obrador’s promises into policy when he takes office in December will come from wildly disparate backgrounds, including , , evangelical Christians and committed Marxists. The coalition even made room for high-level defectors from all three mainstream Mexican political parties, including the Institutional Revolutionary Party of the outgoing current president, Enrique Peña Nieto.

López Obrador has promised to “transform” Mexico.

With such a wildly varied team behind him, can he actually deliver?

The PRI’s pragmatic legacy

Mexican voters punished Peña Nieto and his party, called “el PRI” for its Spanish acronym, for , allowing to fester and turning a blind eye to the country’s . PRI candidate José Antonio Meade received just 16 percent of votes on July 1.

But, as a , it’s hard not to notice that López Obrador’s new ideologically muddled Morena party looks an awful lot like the old PRI.

Until the disastrous presidency of Peña Nieto, who is finishing out his six-year term with a , the PRI was an extraordinarily powerful, political machine. It ruled Mexico almost uncontested for nearly a century.

The PRI emerged from the unrest that followed the Mexican Revolution, which ended in 1920. left Mexico with a devastated countryside and perhaps . For years afterward, dozens of powerful militia-backed strongmen, or “caudillos,” vied for power.

To stabilize the country, President Plutarco Elías Calles in 1929 created a political party, the National Revolutionary Party, with the explicit aim of among the surviving revolutionary caudillos. It would later rebrand as the Partido Revolucionario Institucional, or PRI.

Calles wanted his party to be ideologically indeterminate, because he thought a broad-based political organization would discipline and unify the caudillos without threatening their personal political interests.

So he aides drafting the new party’s platform and bylaws to synthesize fascism, communism and the ideological principles behind the American, English and French political systems.

Calles particularly how into state-sponsored labor collectives to prevent class conflict and quash social unrest.

Versatile and authoritarian

This model allowed Calles to establish a versatile, hybrid governance system.

The PRI successfully incorporated, moderated and controlled different . The PRI was the party of workers and peasants, of professionals and bureaucrats.

When political conflicts occurred, such as two party members vying to lead the same state, party leaders would mandate internal arbitration. The “losing” party was rewarded for his loyalty with hard cash or a political favor. Backroom negotiations and corruption became the governing style of Mexico.

It was a winning strategy. The PRI ran Mexico uncontested from 1929 until 2000.

Political scientist Giovanni Sartori called the PRI a “” – a regime that dominates by being practical and operative. Its only ideology was power.

The PRI was also authoritarian, sometimes brutally so. During its nearly 80-year reign, dissidents “” and student protesters were . Journalists were .

In 2000, Vicente Fox, of the center-right National Action Party, became modern Mexico’s first . The PRI soon , putting Peña Nieto in office in 2012.

Very strange bedfellows

Superficially, López Obrador’s party looks nothing like the PRI.

Morena nominally has a clear ideology. According party literature, it is a “left-wing political organization.” The president-elect’s promises to govern “for the poor” and to respect human rights are classically leftist.

So it made sense when López Obrador recruited the Mexican , a collection of who revere the Chinese Communist Party, to earlier this year.

More difficult to understand was his decision to appoint as advisers high-level defectors from Fox’s conservative and from the PRI itself.

Those who thought of López Obrador as a leftist were most troubled by Morena’s alliance with another party, the .

This fundamentalist evangelical party opposes legalizing and in Mexico – both issues López Obrador says he .

When questioned about his alliances, López Obrador that Morena welcomes all “women and men of goodwill” who want to “transform” Mexico.

Mandate for change

Together, the parties in López Obrador’s coalition won seats, giving it a narrow majority. Seven of those seats belong to .

Morena-affiliated candidates won in Mexico’s lower house, the Chamber of Deputies. Of those, 55 went to the Social Encounter Party.

The Morena candidates for and were also elected. Morena now dominates most .

Constitutionally, López Obrador will have the power to and to pass Constitutional amendments almost unopposed.

Recently, aides to López Obrador suggested that truly transforming Mexico might require . That requires a two-thirds legislative majority, which López Obrador could attain by winning over just a handful of deputies and senators outside his coalition.

fear that López Obrador might seek to the single six-year presidential term limit established in Mexico’s Constitution – a suggestion the president-elect .

But most Mexicans seem more excited than concerned about López Obrador’s strange bedfellows and substantial powers.

Back in April, 89 percent of Mexicans believed the country was on the wrong track, according to . Post-election, a survey by the found, 65 percent feel optimistic about Mexico’s future.

Is Morena the new PRI?

The president-elect ran as a political outsider, but he is a career politician.

Like most Mexican politicians of a certain age, López Obrador was once a , from 1976 to 1983. He ran for president as a candidate of another party, the Revolutionary Democratic Party.

He understands exactly how the PRI dominated Mexican politics for so long.

Like PRI founder Calles before him, López Obrador has built a hybrid political machine designed to unite powerful political elites regardless of ideology.

According to Morena’s declaration of principles, the party is “an open, plural and inclusive space for the participation of Mexicans from all social classes and diverse thought currents, religions and cultures.”

The only requirement for joining Morena, Mexican political theorist Jesús Silva-Herzog, is to obey López Obrador’s leadership.

Where will that leadership take Mexico?

, Senior Lecturer in Human Rights, Constitutional Law and Legal Theory,

This article was originally published on . Read the .

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