Andrés Manuel López Obrador has been elected to be Mexico’s next president. This article in the New York Times strikes me as about as fair a representation as you’re likely to see in a U. S. newspaper:
Mr. López Obrador, who vowed to cut his own salary and raise those of the lowest paid government workers, campaigned on a narrative of social change, including increased pensions for the elderly, educational grants for Mexico’s youth and additional support for farmers.
He said he would fund his programs with the money the nation saves by eliminating corruption, a figure he places at tens of billions of dollars a year, a windfall some experts doubt will materialize.
Realistic or not, the allure of his message is steeped in the language of nostalgia for a better time — and in a sense of economic nationalism that some fear could reverse important gains of the last 25 years.
I wish him good fortune. As in the United States, I suspect that corruption is so widespread and endemic in Mexico that it is the system rather than a perversion of the system. It probably isn’t even thought of as corruption.
Update
The editors of the Wall Street Journal aren’t happy about the election’s results:
This election has dramatically altered Mexican politics. The once-dominant PRI is now a minor party. Its losses are a repudiation of current President Enrique Peña Nieto’s government. The center-right PAN is now the largest opposition party in Congress, but it too is weakened and will have to rebuild after divisive internal battles that undermined Mr. Anaya’s candidacy.
Some 30% of registered voters were millennials, who have no memory of the one-party state of Mr. López Obrador’s youth. They are dissatisfied with Mexico’s status quo and have voted for a change. Let’s hope the change they get isn’t back to the future of state economic control and peso devaluation.
Lopez will almost certainly take Mexico down the same road as Venezuela. We will have a full-blown failed state and total chaos on our border. At the very least the border will have to be sealed tight. More likely would be a full-scale invasion of Mexico and the imposition of some sort of dictatorship.
I really hope Bob Sykes is wrong because it would be a catastrophe for both countries. Also, especially with the young, Socialism is very well received here in the U.S. (Sanders). Are we next?
So Obrador is going to drain the swamp? I expect that will work just as well as it did here. Expect a bunch of billionaires and millionaires in his government. Maybe it will be different this time, just doubt it very much. ( Capitalism and Socialism in places like Mexico just mean that a slightly different group of people make money off of the government.)
Steve
I don’t know much about Obrador, but he faces huge challenges. Corruption is hard to root out, doing so will include the use of violence, and violence always brings uncertainty and danger of replacing one kind of corruption with another.