Mexico's departing president, Andrés Manuel López Obrador, has transformed much of the country’s public life since his 2018 election, when he upended Mexico’s political system and rode to power as an anti-corruption crusader who promised to put 'the poor first.'ALFREDO ESTRELLA/AFP/Getty Images
Jubilant Mexicans packed the central Zócalo square in Mexico City earlier this month for the annual grito, a re-enactment of the original cry for independence from Spanish rule.
President Andrés Manuel López Obrador delivered the grito from the National Palace, shouting “Viva México!” but not before shouting a litany of other “vivas” – “long live” in Spanish. “Long live democracy!” “Long live justice!” and finally, “Long live the fourth transformation!”
The “fourth transformation” referenced his soon-to-conclude administration. The label aggrandizes his government, putting it on the same plane as previous transformations: independence, the Reform Laws of Benito Juárez and the 1910 revolution.
Mr. López Obrador, commonly called AMLO, exits the National Palace on Tuesday. Claudia Sheinbaum, his successor and protégé, will then be sworn in as Mexico’s first female president. Ms. Sheinbaum won the June election with more than 60 per cent of the vote by running on a platform of “building the second level of the fourth transformation.”
The departing President has transformed much of the country’s public life since his 2018 election, when he upended Mexico’s political system and rode to power as an anti-corruption crusader who promised to put “the poor first.”
Mr. López Obrador’s populist and polarizing administration touts accomplishments such as reducing the poverty rate by 5 per cent – something the president credits to a program of cash stipends for seniors, single mothers and students. He hiked the minimum wage and started construction on a suite of mega projects including an airport, a refinery and two railways circling the Yucatán Peninsula and cutting across the Isthmus of Tehuantepec – with the latter pitched as an alternative to the Panama Canal.
Critics, however, see less of a transformation under Mr. López Obrador than backsliding toward Mexico’s predemocratic past, when power was concentrated in the presidency, the division of powers was weak and the line blurred between party and state.
“There’s a deep regression to a Mexico of a single party with an all-powerful president, which we thought we had left behind,” said Enrique Krauze, a historian who has warned of Mr. López Obrador’s anti-democratic instincts.
Mr. López Obrador governed Mexico during turbulent times. He responded to the pandemic with fiscal austerity. Economic growth was anemic. Nearly 40 per cent of Mexicans lack health care – twice the number when he took office – largely because he scrapped a health-insurance program.
“Andrés Manuel took a large part of the health budget and diverted to other things” such as the state-run oil company, Pemex, said Xavier Tello, a physician and health-policy analyst. “That’s not something left-wing governments do.”
Drug-cartel conflicts raged throughout Mr. López Obrador’s administration as he pursued a security policy of “hugs, not bullets.” He militarized the country by turning to the armed forces throughout his administration for everything from constructing an airport and railways to public security to operating seaports and the national customs service.
Mr. López Obrador has controversially used his final month in office to push a package of constitutional changes through Congress. Those changes include proposals to eliminate the country’s commissions that oversee access to information and competition, giving the army command over public security and overhauling the judiciary.
The judicial moves – approved earlier in September and signed into law Sept. 15 – followed Mr. López Obrador’s repeated attacks on the Supreme Court, after judges granted injunctions against his megaprojects. Under the new legal regime, all judges, including Supreme Court justices, will be fired and new candidates put to a popular vote in 2025 and 2027. Political and legal experts express concern that such elections open the judiciary to undue government interference. They also worry about drug cartels meddling in the process.
The changes weaken the requisites for judicial candidates and create an elected oversight body, which could punish justices.
“It’s going to be a tool of political control,” Arturo Pueblita Fernández, president of a Mexican lawyers’ association, said of the oversight body. He described the judicial revisions as “absolutely political,” while “eliminating real checks and balances to gain power” over the judicial branch.
Mr. López Obrador promoted the changes as getting graft out of the judicial branch – even though analysts point to much deeper problems in prosecutors’ offices, which routinely botch investigations and present shoddy cases.
“Now there is real democracy: the people are the ones who rule in Mexico,” he said after Congress approved the moves.
The comments echoed Mr. López Obrador’s previous claims that democracy arrived in Mexico with his election rather than the process of replacing the Institutional Revolutionary Party (PRI) – which ruled Mexico for most of the 20th century – with a multiparty democracy.
The democratic transition started in the late 1970s and accelerated after the 1988 election, when the left lost a in a vote that was considered fraudulent. Mexico established an independent electoral institute in the 1990s, which developed voter rolls, issued voter identifications and oversaw elections.
Opposition parties won a majority of the seats in congress in 1997, ushering in two decades of divided government. Former Coca-Cola executive Vicente Fox finally ousted the PRI in 2000, though he isn’t remembered fondly.
“He didn’t deliver on the promise of change he came to office with,” said Carlos Bravo Regidor, a political analyst in Mexico City. “His term ended the day he won the election.”
Mr. López Obrador became Mexico City mayor the same year. He ran to succeed Mr. Fox in 2006 – after surviving a ham-fisted attempt at impeaching him, which would have made him ineligible as a candidate – but narrowly lost to Felipe Calderón.
Undeterred, he declared the election fraudulent, refused to recognize Mr. Calderón as the winner and ultimately declared himself “legitimate president.” He ran again unsuccessfully in 2012 – once again alleging that the race was rigged – before winning with 53 per cent of the vote in 2018.
The accusations of fraud have become a foundational myth for the President and his MORENA party – while his refusal to accept unfavourable electoral results has long cast doubt on his democratic credentials. He has also consistently tried to weaken the country’s independent electoral authorities.
Mexicans, however, have largely been disappointed with the results of democratic change – both politically and economically – leaving Mr. López Obrador to capitalize in 2018 after quixotically touring the country for a dozen years in a perpetual campaign.
In the political realm, Mexico experienced alternancia, in which parties traded power, but seldom did things differently. The partidocracia (rule by political parties) also took hold. Mexican political parties claimed generous public subsidies and controlled ballot access, making lawmakers responsive to party bosses rather than constituents.
“We ended up with a system that was completely unrepresentative, in which the parties had a piece of state power in the federal budget that responded to nobody,” said Federico Estévez, political-science professor at the Autonomous Technological Institute of Mexico.
The democratic transition also coincided with the opening of Mexico’s economy and economic reforms.
That opening started with Mexico joining the General Agreement on Tariffs and Trades in 1986 under then-president Miguel de la Madrid to halt soaring inflation, crushing debt and currency devaluations resulting from previous populist profligacy. The North American free-trade agreement followed in 1993, making Mexico an export-oriented economy as manufacturers moved in.
U.S. goods found shelf space in a country where contraband Levi’s jeans and Nerds candy were sold in itinerant markets. But NAFTA failed to make Mexico “First World” as promised.
The opening did stabilize the economy, but poverty stayed stubbornly high. Wages and purchasing power stagnated and inequality widened – with telecom mogul Carlos Slim turning the Telmex privatization into one of the world’s largest personal fortunes. Corruption remained rampant, too.
“Democracy didn’t mean major progress for many Mexicans in terms of their well-being, improved security or their personal happiness. It was the total opposite,” said Blanca Heredia, a political analyst in Mexico City.
With Mr. López Obrador, she added, “There’s been a change and clear orientation in government action toward the neediest.”
Mr. López Obrador repeatedly derides the economic opening as the “neoliberal period,” railing against its privatizations, bailouts and widespread inequality. But in governing, he maintained continental free trade, didn’t raise taxes, slashed bureaucracies and respected central-bank autonomy.
Mr. Slim doubled his fortune during his administration, while other Mexican billionaires prospered, too.
The President only unleashed spending in the prelude to the 2024 elections, when he increased cash-stipend payments – leaving Ms. Sheinbaum with a deep fiscal deficit.
“López Obrador managed to get through his six years in office without major economic calamities thanks to the legacy and institutions that neoliberalism built,” said Carlos Ramírez, head of consultancy Integralia, and a former member of the government’s financial stability council.
Still, Mr. López Obrador never fails to remind Mexicans of what preceded him, while tersely dismissing unfavourable news with the words, “I have other information.”
“Andrés Manuel López Obrador found the keys to the social irritation that had been building up over decades … and became a spokesman for that anger,” said Emiliano Ruiz Parra, a journalist who covered his 2006 campaign and its aftermath.
“He translated it into a very understandable language,” he continued. “That made people feel represented by the President, a President who was no longer seen heading the elite, but rather an avenger of the majority.”
Adding to his approval is the opposition’s unpopularity. It has failed to counter Mr. López Obrador’s constant attacks and messaging, or present fresh faces rather than the retreads voted out of office.
“There’s a total lack of leadership in the opposition,” said Fernando Dworak, a political analyst in Mexico City. “The opposition has not understood what has happened between 2018 and today. If they did, they would know that López Obrador was perceived as authentic.”
Mr. López Obrador ends his presidency with an approval rating topping 70 per cent. A Gallup survey showed Mexicans’ confidence in government more than doubling to 61 per cent in 2023 from 29 per cent in 2018.
“Mr. López Obrador is the president who came to change everything in this country, because we needed a change,” said Germán Castillo Díaz, 61, a pensioner in Morelos state near Mexico City. “He’s helped my parents, my in-laws and many of my neighbours with his programs.”
With reporting by Estrella Pedroza in Cuernavaca, Mexico