The Mexican Election

Mexico has just elected a populist.

And he's not a right wing populist, if that's what Donald Trump is, but a left wing populist.

Andrés Manuel López Obrador, popularly as AMLO, is a member of Mexico's brand new National Regeneration Movement (Movimiento Regeneración Nacional, MORENA), a left wing party that didn't even exist at the time of the last Mexican presidential election.  MORENA doesn't have enough representation in the Mexican legislature to have a majority, so it has entered into a coalition with the left-wing Labor Party and right-wing Social Encounter Party under the name "Juntos Haremos Historia."  The fact that MORENA has aligned with two other parties, one from the right, and one from the left, isn't actually surprsiing, but rather indicative of its populist nature.

MORENA is  hard to define, and Americans are going to be struggling to do just that.  It is Cardenist, socialist, and nationalist in nature.  It's not going to be like any party that Americans have had to deal with in Mexico for decades.  It will be radical, but that radicalism will be of a form that we'll have a hard time grasping.  Some will call it Socialist and even Marxist, others will declare it Fascist or Peronist.  It's what it is, and in some ways it will be all of those things and none of them at the same time.

AMLO promises, basically, to end corruption and to champion the poor, fine promises but ones lacking in real detail.  Nobody knows really what he'll do, but we do know that he's had to align with populist parties from the right and the left, meaning presumably that his focus will have to be both for the impoverished in a now middle class nation that has a mindset of poverty that doesn't quite reflect the reality, and on ending rampant corruption and crime, which is in fact a giant Mexican problem.

Of course, AMLO, if he's as left wing as he original was, could just make problems worse.  Mexico has plenty of its own problems to be sure, but as the PRI has slowly declined its brand of Mexican socialism also has and in fact the economy has enormously improved.  Most Mexicans are now in the middle class, even if Mexico's national psychology does not allow that mental concession, for the first time in Mexico's history, a gigantic achievement which free marketers everywhere should be trumpeting.  Mass Mexican illegal immigration is now a much reduced problem for the United States and in fact, at least recently, there has been more migration back into Mexico (and even more population transfer in that direction if you include American migration to Mexico, which is quite real) and the big immigration problem now, as we've just noted, stems from Central America, not Mexico.  MORENA could really disrupt that economic progress and even send it into retreat.

What can be done about corruption remains to be seen. Quite a lot, perhaps, particularly as the century old grip of the PRI on Mexican politics has now ended, although that grip was loosening and evolving for quite some time.  A big factor in corruption anywhere is money and in the Mexican case that money comes, ultimately, from the United States, tied to our illegal drug appetite.  That will be difficult in the extreme for AMLO to do anything about, but it would appear that it would at least require an increased police presence in a nation where that's been increasing anyhow. And that's where this could get to be frightening, or not.  Mexico generally hasn't handled such things terrible well historically, but then the Mexico of today isn't the one of the past.

Indeed, that's pretty evident as this small revolution was done at the ballot box.  We no longer even think of it being done at the point of a gun in Mexico anymore, which at one time is how such things were in fact done.

Should be interesting, anyhow.

Just as learning how a Mexican populist president of a now middle class nation economically tied to the United States deals with an American populist president, and vice versa.