The following article is reprinted from Catalyst: A Journal of Theory and Strategy, a publication from the Jacobin Foundation. Right now, you can subscribe to the print edition of Catalyst for just $20.
A recent Gallup poll tallied the approval rating of Andrés Manuel López Obrador (AMLO) of the Morena party, now six years into his presidential administration in Mexico, at 80 percent. In October, he will hand off power to Claudia Sheinbaum, his longtime political protégé. Sheinbaum achieved a landslide victory in the presidential elections on June 2, garnering close to 60 percent of the vote, more than 30 percentage points ahead of the runner-up. The main opposition parties — the Institutional Revolutionary Party (PRI), the National Action Party (PAN), and the already diminished Party of the Democratic Revolution (PRD) — which ran together as a coalition this time, lost significant ground compared to 2018, securing about 27 percent of the vote, around 10 percentage points less than their combined total in the previous general election. In this recent contest, Morena, formed just over a decade ago, secured a two-thirds supermajority in the Chamber of Deputies and fell just two representatives short of achieving the same in the Senate. How should we understand the success of the electoral left in contemporary Mexico?
This article offers an outline of the model of reform pushed by AMLO, what he calls the country’s “fourth transformation of public life.” AMLO, who handily triumphed in the previous elections, frames Morena’s mission as spearheading this cuarta transformación. Linking Morena’s program to the momentous events of the war of independence in the 1810s, the liberal…
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Auteur: Edwin F. Ackerman
