¿President AMLO?
By Alan Stoga

Six years ago, Vicente Fox had not yet secured his party’s nomination, and few outside his inner circle believed he had any realistic chance of winning the Mexican presidency. But Fox eventually triumphed over the legacy of seven decades of PRI political control — and a weak PRI candidate who lacked the enthusiastic support of some of his party’s barons — in part by selling himself as the candidate of change.

Unfortunately, Fox’s first great victory was practically his last, since very little has changed in Mexico during his administration. His party, the PAN, is weak and divided, and his political operators have not been skilled enough to leverage Fox’s durable popularity into practical power. He has been unable to overcome the entrenched political interests that opposed his election and unwilling to stretch the envelope of presidential authority as his predecessors routinely did.

The reality is that Mr. Fox has turned out to be a better democrat than President, which is not enough for a country to succeed in the twenty-first century.

The judgment of Mexico’s business, political, and intellectual elite is brutal. They want competitive democracy, but they also long the days of strong, decisive presidential leadership; if forced to choose, many would choose the latter. Thus, in their eyes, President Fox has been a nearly complete failure.

Fox’s inability to change Mexico is the essential backdrop for Mexico’s next presidential election, even though it is still more than a year away. In some ways, the campaign for the presidency, which has long since started, is likely to be about who can bring real change to the country. And, like in 2000, the election may end up being more about personalities than about parties — which should not be a surprise in a country which knew only single party rule for most of the twentieth century.

None of Mexico’ political parties can elect a candidate on the shear strength of their organization and their brand. While the PRI has demonstrated the resiliency of its political organization, it is burdened by the legacy of its corrupt history and by uninspiring national leadership. The PAN looks like a party in decline, with party purists more interested in recapturing control from Fox-istas than governing or in winning elections. The left wing PRD has emerged as the dominant party in Mexico City and in some of the poor states in the center and south of the country, but lacks an effective nationwide structure.

Against this drab background, Andres Manuel Lopes Obrador, Mexico City’s PRD mayor, has emerged as the one outsize political personality in Mexico — and, hence, the earlier leader in the presidential race. AMLO is a populist, nationalist, against globalization, and instinctively anti-U.S., in the old tradition of Mexico’s PRI, from which he defected years ago. Like other Latin American populists, he appeals to the millions of poor people who were effectively enfranchised over the last decade or two, but who have not benefited much in fact (or at all in perception) from the economic liberalizations of the nineties.

If the election were held tomorrow, AMLO would likely win. Not only is his hard core constituency larger than anyone else’s, but it is easier to mobilize with populist rhetoric — as Lula, Chavez, Kirchner and others have demonstrated in their own countries. It is a simple rule of politics in Latin America today: poor people, no longer afraid of voting their interests, will elect candidates whose basic offer is to change their poverty. And that is the tonic which AMLO is selling.

The temptation is to forecast that AMLO’s election is inevitable. But Mexicans will not vote until July, 2006, which is an eternity in electoral politics in a country which is still defining what competitive politics means in practice. AMLO could eventually face smart opponents who will try to force him to define his specific policy descriptions for the country and to defend his poor record managing Mexico City. The PRI might somehow be able to mobilize some of its old peasant base, much of which has moved to the cities and seems to be drifting towards AMLO and the PRD. The PAN might come to its senses and focus on the future instead of the past. If AMLO chooses to focus his campaign on the people most likely to vote for him, rather than appealing to the center, then his opponents could try to beat him by uniting and appealing to the middle class that would be the biggest losers if the country shifted decisively leftward.

None of those possibilities are as likely as AMLO’s victory, especially because the political center and right in Mexico seem incapable of defining or executing anything like a coherent political strategy. Indeed, their efforts to confront AMLO so far have only succeeded in turning him into an internationally recognized poster child for democracy.

Debate about how AMLO would govern has turned on whether he would be more like Chavez or Lula, which has become short hand for "radical leftist" or "pragmatic social democrat." In fact, President AMLO seems more likely to be a traditional Mexican nationalist, more an Echeverria than a Salinas — between someone whose economic model is rooted in an era of large, state (or, at least, locally) owned enterprises that the government can control and someone who believes that Mexico must become globally competitive to prosper.

The simple minded reality is that Mexico is the prism through which the United States — and others who share a U.S. centric view of the region — looks at and understands Latin America. In this sense, as AMLO goes, Latin America goes. For better or for worse.