Populism’s Grip on Mexico

DAN KURTZ-PHELAN

Earlier this month, Claudia Sheinbaum won a sweeping victory in Mexico’s presidential election. Although a lot of the coverage framed the results as a win for women and progressive politics, the story is far more complicated. Mexico’s democracy is in trouble, warns Denise Dresser, a political analyst in Mexico.

For years, Dresser has watched Sheinbaum’s party and its previous leader, Andrés Manuel López Obrador, govern through polarization and the erosion of democratic institutions, even as the country struggles with violence, corruption, and persistent inequality. There is a chance Sheinbaum charts a different course. But if not, Dresser worries Mexico could face an autocratic future.

Denise Dresser, thank you so much for joining me today and for the series of really trenchant pieces you’ve done on Mexico and the state of Mexican democracy for Foreign Affairs over the last several years.

DENISE DRESSER

Thank you for the invitation.

DAN KURTZ-PHELAN

We are having this conversation just over a week after Mexico’s presidential election. Claudia Sheinbaum was expected to win, given that she is the successor to the quite popular incumbent, Andrés Manuel López Obrador, known as AMLO, and she is in his party, Morena. But I think most observers seem to be surprised by just how commandingly she won, with a more than 30 point lead over her next strongest challenger—her party won a supermajority in the lower House of Congress and nearly did in the Senate—so it really is quite a staggering victory. As you watched the campaign and the results of the election, what to your mind accounts for just the extent of that victory that she won?

DENISE DRESSER

Well, first of all, I was not shocked by her victory. Serious analysts understood that it was very hard for the opposition to win in an environment where the playing field was no longer level, where the opposition carried the stigma of past governance and was not viewed as a truly competitive, attractive alternative. I was shocked by the magnitude of her victory. It was a landslide that we have not witnessed since Mexico transitioned to electoral democracy in the year 2000. She won with 35 million votes, over 30 percent above the opposition coalition. So this gives her a mandate, and it gives her a level of power, that even Andrés Manuel López Obrador, her predecessor, did not have.

And I think that much of the American media—its take has been wrong because so much of the coverage has centered on the fact that she’s a woman, the fact that she’s Jewish. The central point of focus and of attention should be not only why she won, and there are a number of reasons, but the consequences of her victory. Why she won, I think, is a combination of several factors, which is the governments of the past, the divided and discredited opposition that never did a mea culpa and never assumed the mistakes of the past or offered to correct them. But I think the reasons behind her victory are more complex.

One has to do with a very popular president. I always argued over the past six years that the so-called Fourth Transformation wasn’t just a government. It was also a narrative; a very seductive narrative, a narrative that is popular throughout the world and that accompanies many examples of backsliding in other places—Hungary, Poland until recently, India, El Salvador, Nicaragua as the most extreme cases. But it’s the narrative of the people versus the elites, the people versus the vested interest, the people versus the oligarchy, the people versus the traditional establishment parties, the people against liberal democracy that never did anything for them.

And one of the changes that we did see under López Obrador’s government was his government enacted a series of social programs that are based largely on cash disbursements, pension programs for the elderly, scholarships for the young, and a series of supportive programs for people in the rural countryside. And what was noticeable about these programs is the cash aspect of them, which is somewhat contradictory insofar as the narrative of López Obrador being a leftist, because this is another thing that I think most mainstream media in the United States and elsewhere got wrong.

I don’t believe that López Obrador is a leftist. In many ways, his program has been an extension, or a strengthening, of neoliberal approaches to social policy, and cash transfers are the most clear example of this. Cash transfers are something that, for example, the Republican Party would dream of having while dismantling the social safety nets of the state, which is basically what López Obrador did.

And for many of Mexico’s poor, and we’re talking about what has been a permanent subclass of over 50 million people, suddenly becoming important in the narrative, suddenly feeling represented by a president who talked to them, who looked like them, who ate like them, who gave them dignity, and who constructed identity politics in Mexico in a way that we’d never seen them in the past—plus cash disbursements that filled up a void that a very inefficient state had not filled in the past. If institutions never worked for you under democracy, and suddenly you got a pension for your elderly parent, and that pension had distributive effects throughout the whole family—then of course, why not vote for the party that for the first time seemed to be caring about you and paying attention to you?

DAN KURTZ-PHELAN

So, there’s a ton to pick up on on that, but it’s worth lingering on the historical context a little bit. When one-party rule ended in Mexico in 2000, it was seen as this incredible step forward. But as you’ve noted in a number of the pieces you’ve written for Foreign Affairs, and in your work even preceding that, that democratic transition didn’t exactly turn out to be as successful as people would’ve hoped when the PRI was first voted out in 2000. So as you look back at that transition, what exactly went wrong? What did the political system fail to do that helped pave the way for López Obrador’s election in 2018?

DENISE DRESSER

The central issue that it didn’t address, and that paved the way for López Obrador, was not taking on inequality, not taking on concentration of wealth; having minimalist social programs and assuming that Mexico was going to have a permanent subclass until it started to grow quickly, something that never happened in the years of the transition. Average growth was between 1.5 and 2 percent a year; and so you had a pie that wasn’t growing very quickly, and it was very badly distributed. And this is something that López Obrador picked up on, and it’s an argument that he’s been making over the years.

But I’d say the tipping point that led the government of the transition to be voted out in 2018 came in the presidency of Enrique Peña Nieto, 2012 to 2018, that was plagued by scandals of corruption, massive corruption; it was plagued by the killing of the 43 students in Ayotzinapa; just the persistence of crony capitalism. There was a massive punishment vote against the PRI and López Obrador swept into office.

And one of the things he did, and I think that explains also why Claudia won, is he shifted the center of axis of Mexican politics toward the left. The cultural victory of Andrés Manuel López Obrador was to shift public debate in favor of issues like inequality, poverty, concentration of wealth, the privileges of the elite. And that, as I said, is a very seductive narrative, and a very true one. I think his diagnosis has always been correct. What has been appalling to witness, as someone who voted for him, for example, as I did in 2018, is to see the dissonance between the correct diagnosis of Mexico’s ills and then the absolutely incorrect policy positions taken. Because what he decided to do was to resurrect dominant-party rule, but now with his party: “I’m going to create a situation where once again, my party kind of competes, but never loses, and the opposition kind of competes, but never wins.”

So, early on, he started to change the rules of the game. This is something we saw with Orbán in Hungary. It’s something we’ve seen with Netanyahu in Israel. And that’s why my argument now—for several years—is, you need to incorporate Mexico into the countries that are facing a process of democratic backsliding; because what López Obrador has been doing is very similar to what we’ve seen in other latitudes, where you have leaders that govern by polarizing the electorate.

DAN KURTZ-PHELAN

So you noted that his promises to make progress against inequality and corruption, two kind of scourges of those decades after the transition in 2000 in Mexico, were so central to López Obrador’s initial campaign and to the messaging during his presidency. Did he make progress on either one of those? Does he have anything to show for that focus as you look at his six years in power, as we head into the next transition?

DENISE DRESSER

We did see some concrete advances in a very specific area that have to do with poverty by income. 5 million people were lifted out of poverty through social transfers, cash transfers—also the rise of the minimum wage, which was a significant achievement of his administration. Yet at the same time, while you could applaud him for that, he cut spending in health and in education, tried to centralize the health system in a way that created a massive, massive lack of supply of medicines throughout the country. And he paradoxically created a situation where people have more income, but because of the essential collapse of the health system—in the past, you had 20 million people without basic access to healthcare. Now, you have 50 million in total, because he did away with a series of programs like the Seguro Popular that provided healthcare to people who are not in the formal economy. So the poor by income who were lifted to another strata now have to pay for private healthcare.

And extreme poverty actually grew, which underscores the clientelist nature of some of the social programs—because if they had been truly universal, you would have seen many of the extreme poor lifted from that. But the extreme poor live in rural areas where it’s very hard to give them cash disbursements. And on the other hand, while you saw this reduction in poverty by income, you also saw a rise in concentration of wealth.

This has been six years in which Mexican oligarchs have been jumping for joy, because instead of taking one of the sources of inequality head-on, and I’d say the source of that historically has been crony capitalism and corruption, López Obrador allowed crony capitalism to continue—but with his cronies, or with new cronies that he incorporated into his close circle. For example, the fortune of Carlos Slim, the richest man in Mexico, along with Germán Larrea—his fortune grew by 70 percent in the last four years. He was the beneficiary of 2,500 contracts given by direct adjudication; in other words, non-competitive bids.

And the fact that López Obrador does not believe in regulation, which runs contrary to what a leftist government would’ve done—a leftist government with his kind of support six years ago would have started by taxing the rich, would have started with fiscal reform that took on the concentration of wealth, would have pushed for robust regulation. But instead, what he’s done is to weaken any form of regulation that has benefited the cronies. And now he’s pushing for Plan C, that entails the elimination of all forms of regulation, so that we go back to a system where the cronies and the oligarchs have to go to the National Palace and cut out a personal deal for their sectors.

And another thing I’d like to point out—and he received no punishment vote for this, nor did Claudia—was what happened to Mexico during the pandemic. Mexico is officially listed in most scientific publications of prestige, including The Lancet, as one of the countries that worst handled the pandemic. Because López Obrador did not believe that it was serious, compared it to influenza, kept coming out in the morning press conference and minimizing what was happening and saying, “Embrace each other, believe in Jesus, believe in the power of the family.” He did not implement a national mask mandate. He never used a mask. Mexico lagged behind in terms of access to vaccines, never did contact tracing, never did any kind of testing for foreigners who flew into Mexico, because it was the one place that wasn’t doing testing. So 800,000 people died—over 300,000 excess mortality deaths—but there was no punishment vote for this because López Obrador is a master of narrative, and he managed to convince Mexico’s population that this was a global phenomenon; there’s nothing they could have done better.

Claudia, during the debates, the presidential debates, came out and said that Mexico City had fared very well when it was actually the city that had the largest percentage of deaths vis-à-vis its population. I frequently say that in a normal democracy, Claudia Sheinbaum wouldn’t even be able to run for mayor because she distributed 280,000 kits with Ivermectin as part of her policy to combat COVID. And as you know, Ivermectin is not a substance that was ever approved to cure COVID.

So one of the things that the U.S. media has also underscored is that Claudia will be different to López Obrador because she is a scientist, she has a PhD in environmental engineering, and I have always questioned that take on Claudia Sheinbaum because of the way she handled the pandemic.

DAN KURTZ-PHELAN

One of the other major failings of the post-transition governments has of course been the security situation, which has gotten progressively worse over the decades, and the death toll and extent of cartel control of not just the drug trade but also other industries at this point has only grown over time. How did that change, how did that landscape change under López Obrador? And is there anything in Sheinbaum’s record or rhetoric that suggests she will take a different approach than López Obrador has?

DENISE DRESSER

In terms of insecurity, one of the issues in which the governments of the transition also failed was dealing with rising levels of homicide, of infiltration of governments by organized crime, the growing presence of drug cartels in major states, and the alarming rise in the rate of homicides, femicides. And the governments of the transition were too busy worrying about changing the electoral rules of the game and having access for the first time to distribution of the spoils. And the only effort that we saw on the part of one of the governments of the transition was Felipe Calderón, 2006 to 2012. And he made a very bad policy choice, which was to try and use the military to combat growing insecurity.

The Mexican military, historically, has been a very small force. It was always placed under civilian rule. Mexico did not have a military of the sort that you saw in Argentina and Brazil and Chile and Uruguay and Paraguay. It was small, it never had economic resources, it never had power. It was used basically to carry out vaccination campaigns or when there were floods, national emergencies. And yet, because Mexico for much of its history has not had a functional, well-funded, professional police force, Calderón decided to resort to the Mexican military. So he took them out of the barracks, started operating these joint efforts between the federal police and the military to take on cartels in Chihuahua, in Baja California, in Michoacán. And then what happened is that his successors, including Peña Nieto, tried to expand the role of the military, realizing that the problem was growing and they didn’t have any other instruments to combat it with.

Andrés Manuel López Obrador, when he was a candidate in 2018, one of his campaign promises was, “I’m going to return the military to the barracks. Militarization is dangerous, it’s harmful, it’s anti-democratic.” People like me voted for him on the basis of that campaign promise. Yet once in office, a month later, he changed his mind and has governed—co-governed—in tandem with the military, which is something unprecedented in Mexico’s history.

Today, the Mexican military controls over 200 activities that used to be in the hands of civilians, such as the control of airspace, ports, immigration, many economic activities—they’re the main builders in the country. And they operate in a context of absolute opacity because many of the activities that they’re involved in have been reclassified as “of national security,” which means that they’re not subjected to the national transparency law and are not regulated by the transparency institute that AMLO anyway wants to do away with. And they have received, that we know through the budget, increasing budget allocations. And they operate now as a kind of parallel government with their own interests, their own businesses. They now are operating and building hotels near the Tren Maya. They have their own airline, Mexicana de Aviación, subsidized by the Mexican government; they control 18 airports.

And they dedicate most of their time—one of the constitutional reforms that AMLO pushed forward in his initial years in office was the National Guard, whereby he reformed the constitution so that the National Guard could operate in tandem with the military to take on violence, cartels, et cetera. In reality, the National Guard spends most of its time doing the dirty work of the United States government in terms of immigration. Ninety-two percent of the activities of the National Guard are capturing, running after, deporting, jailing immigrants, because Mexico has become the de facto wall that tries to stop immigrants from crossing the border in return for the Biden administration keeping silent on Mexico’s democratic erosion.

DAN KURTZ-PHELAN

You referred to the primacy of migration in the U.S.-Mexican relationship; that, in many ways, has been the primary or even sole concern of the Biden administration, the Trump administration before that, as they’ve dealt with López Obrador. How has that shaped the U.S.-Mexican relationship, and do you anticipate any change in that dynamic?

DENISE DRESSER

Ever since Donald Trump became a candidate, and was subsequently elected, the issue of immigration became central—both to his candidacy and to the narrative that he used to polarize the electorate and to gain support for his candidacy and his presidency. It was the discourse of, “Immigrants are dangerous, they’re bad hombres, they’re criminals, they are overrunning us and we need to protect the country; make America great again; make America white again.” And when López Obrador was elected, he made a pact with Trump, a pact that entailed, “I will try to control immigration as much as I can. I will put the National Guard at your service. I will stop and deport immigrants. And I will also take back the immigrants that you deport.” Which is something that Mexico had never done, which was de facto become a third safe country, which is where people are returned to while they process their asylum claims.

And this has created a humanitarian crisis along the border and led to encampments of migrants that in the past were solely from Central America, but now come from Argentina, from Haiti, from Africa. You see encampments of Haitians in Mexico City, for example. The Mexican economy, with very slow growth, does not have the capacity to absorb this labor force, or the capacity to care for them. Yet Mexico accepted this in return for the silence of Trump on democratic backsliding taking place in Mexico.

López Obrador even went to the extent of going to Washington when Trump was campaigning for reelection, appearing in the Rose Garden next to Donald Trump, calling him the best president since Abraham Lincoln, and Trump in return praised him. We subsequently found out in interviews and books that have been written about Trump that he made fun of Mexico’s minister of foreign affairs for caving in so quickly to Trump’s demand that the National Guard in Mexico be used to detain migrants. Biden renewed that pact—not explicitly, but he’s approached López Obrador in the same way.

DAN KURTZ-PHELAN

If you were advising the U.S. government, if you were advising Washington on how to manage this dynamic, just given the political importance of the migration issue right now, is there a better way? Is there a better strategy, diplomatically, to approach this than the one that both Trump and Biden have adopted?

DENISE DRESSER

The problem for Biden is that he’s facing a very contested election in which immigration has become a central issue. Trump has made it the defining issue. So Biden has very little room to maneuver vis-à-vis Claudia Sheinbaum. But I think that the message should be, “Okay, I’ll keep silent until November. But if I win, and if you continue with this process, then there will be costs, and the costs will be implemented by my Department of Commerce, by my Department of Energy.” The North American Free Trade Agreement, now known as the USMCA, is coming up for renegotiation in 2026. So it’s not as if the United States doesn’t have instruments, cudgels, sticks and carrots that it could use vis-à-vis Claudia Sheinbaum. It does have them. The problem is that the United States is losing credibility as a government capable of using those instruments.

And also, we are facing a scenario where Trump could actually win—and if he did win, then Claudia would face a very difficult scenario in which Trump would try to extract even more concessions from the Mexican government than it has done up to now, also using free trade as an instrument to extract concessions. And one of the things that Claudia and others have been arguing is this is a time of incredible opportunity for Mexico because of “near shoring.” What’s happening in the trade war between the United States and China, Mexico is poised to be the beneficiary of the changing terms of trade.

The problem she faces is that if Trump wins, or even if Biden does, the United States is going to clamp down on the possibility of her interacting with China. Or at the same time, if she does not face some key issues that have nothing to do with democracy but are top of mind for Mexico now that have to do with the lack of water, climate change, and the lack of energy and electricity, Mexico is not going to be the great winner of near shoring, and investment will go elsewhere. So I hope that she is thinking about this as she plans ahead.

So the main question between now and October, when she takes office, is, who’s actually going to be governing Mexico? And, will [AMLO] go off quietly into the dark night? He’s been such a powerful force in terms of shaping the narrative, shaping how people feel about democracy. A recent Pew Research Center poll on support for democracy and authoritarianism came out, and Mexico is among the middle-income countries where support for authoritarianism is at 71 percent. So López Obrador’s influence has been not only in terms of winning his election, Claudia winning her election with his support, but also changing how Mexicans feel vis-à-vis authoritarianism and democracy. And that cultural effect, that effect in terms of our values as a country, our expectations as a country, our aspirations as a country—those changes, I think, constitute a major regression.

DAN KURTZ-PHELAN

You mentioned this complicated and interesting dynamic between the United States and Mexico and China. How has López Obrador managed these two important economic and political relationships for Mexico, and how do you expect Sheibaum to manage that very, very tricky scenario?

DENISE DRESSER

Well, as you know, China has been making major inroads in terms of investment all over Latin America; in the absence of the United States’ attention, it’s filling a void. And China is investing heavily in Mexico. The Chinese car company BYD was thinking of setting up a factory in Mexico to export electric cars to the United States. It’s not clear whether or not that will happen. This will probably be subject to whatever pressures, negotiations emerge as a result of the U.S. election.

In the meantime, AMLO’s position toward the Chinese has been: open arms, “Welcome.” Because he’s tried to position himself—in terms of foreign policy, as well—as a counterweight to the American hegemony in Latin America.

And he’s also played the Russian card, I’d say ably and perniciously. The Russian embassy in Mexico is now the largest it has outside of Washington, and the Russian embassy in Mexico has become a main source of propaganda and disinformation and anti-democratic messaging throughout the continent, Mexico included. Mexico never came out forcefully against the Russian invasion of Ukraine. López Obrador did not even call it an invasion. And Russia’s military forces have marched in every military parade since Lopez Obrador has been president, and that in and of itself says a lot.

DAN KURTZ-PHELAN

Looking forward to how Sheinbaum’s government might operate, she was, of course, mayor of Mexico City, as you’ve noted. Is there anything about her time as mayor that might indicate the ways in which she will govern differently than López Obrador did? Even given the constraints that you’ve explained very, very well, what might change about the nature of government given what you’ve seen about her time in office and other jobs?

DENISE DRESSER

Well, she’s temperamentally very different from him. She’s not a charismatic leader. She does not have a populist, fiery, divisive rhetoric. She tried to emulate it during the campaign, and even copied his accent from Tabasco, his native state. But it doesn’t come easily to her. She’s more of a technocrat. She constantly underscores that she makes policies on the basis of evidence, of data. She created an agency for digital innovation in Mexico City. She promoted some small renewable energy projects. She was able to decrease the level of homicides, not by a lot, but somewhat, in Mexico City—but because she actually had a functional police force, she did not form part of the militarization of public security, that process that took place in many other states in Mexico.

So what you could expect is perhaps someone who operates better in terms of designing and implementing policy, but not a substantial change in the policies themselves. So I think she might be a more technocratic version of authoritarian populism, but not devoid of the hegemonic impulses and the abuses of power that come along with having supermajorities and little if no checks and balances.

DAN KURTZ-PHELAN

That is a good, if grim, note to end on. Denise Dresser, thank you so much for joining me and for the series of pieces you’ve done for Foreign Affairs around the election and also in the months and years before that.

DENISE DRESSER

Thank you very much. I look forward to our collaboration, and Mexico is in for some interesting and I’d say worrisome times.