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The Left is about to win in Mexico. In his third run for the presidency, Andres Manuel Lopez Obrador (AMLO) holds an overwhelming 17-20 percentage-point lead heading into election day on July 1. As in his past attempts, powerful enemies abound. Two of the richest men in the country have openly weighed in against him, sending messages to their employees warning against an “impending economic model … that gives handouts without having to work” and pleading them to vote to “preserve the economic system that allows you to have your job.” Attacks are recycled from previous elections: AMLO’s old age (though he’s only sixty-four), the specter of a Venezuela-style debacle, a “return” to the failed protectionist strategies of the 1970s’ Institutional Revolutionary Party (PRI), the then- and now-ruling party. The country’s comentocracia — the recurring cast of television pundits and opinion columnists — traffics in hyperbole, stoking fears of an authoritarian populist government. AMLO, running under the banner of his recently minted party Movimiento de Regeneración Nacional (MORENA), is pitted in a four-way race. He faces Ricardo Anaya, a self-styled neoliberal wunderkind heading a coalition between the scraps of the historic center-right and center-left parties (the National Action Party [PAN] and the Party of the Democratic Revolution [PRD]) and currently under investigation for money laundering; Jose Antonio Meade, the current PRI regime’s bureaucrat, running on a claim of technocratic “expertise;” and Jaime Rodriguez Calderon, who stepped down as governor of the large state of Nuevo Leon to run a haphazard independent campaign as the folksy “outsider” whose main contribution to the electoral cycle so far has been his proposal to chop off the hands of corrupt office holders. Lopez Obrador has come very close to winning before. In 2006 he lost by less than 1 percent of the vote in an election marred by irregularities (although it was never clear how systematic these were). In 2012, he lost by a larger percentage (6 percent), in an election with well-documented vote-buying tactics deployed by the PRI’s victorious Peña Nieto. AMLO has been in the national spotlight since 2000 when he became mayor of Mexico City. What explains his astronomical success now?

A Status Quo in Disarray The country’s current state seems to confirm the critique AMLO laid out during his first run twelve years ago. The exiting Peña Nieto government presided over anemic economic growth that left poverty levels — which hover around 50 percent — basically untouched. The death toll of the drug war, already in the hundreds of thousands, grew to a historic peak last year. High-profile corruption cases have plagued the PRI administration. Much touted free market reforms like opening the state-owned oil company PEMEX to private investment and an “educational reform” aimed at weakening teachers’ unions — have yielded meek results. Lopez Obrador used these years to build an anti-establishment persona. If hardcore supporters now project onto him much more than what he actually promises, it is because his figure became part of a collective subconscious. A MORENA campaign ad that intentionally omits his name used a phrase that has caught on with the general public: “We would be better off with you know who.” But the PRI is not the only major political party to have entered the electoral cycle in disarray. The PAN, which governed the country between 2000-2012, devolved into a “pocket opposition” during the Peña Nieto presidency, supporting most of his proposed major reforms en bloc. In addition, when the time to choose a candidate for the upcoming presidential race heated up, Anaya, then the president of the party, strong-armed his way into the nomination, alienating an entire wing of the party committed to the candidacy of Margarita Zavala, wife of ex-president Felipe Calderon. Zavala split and made a short-lived run as an independent, eventually bowing out of the race as her numbers remained in the single digits. The PRD, which nominated AMLO in his two previous runs, entered into a crisis after the 2012 defeat. The party’s centrists took over, severing ties with AMLO and launching a full-blown rebranding of the party as a collaborationist, “responsible left.” The party went on to sign a “Pact for Mexico,” pledging to focus on shared political goals with Peña Nieto’s presidency. This marked the start of an erosion of its identity as a leftist opposition party and condemned any attempts to pivot to an anti-establishment message later. The PAN-PRD coalition for this election has been a flop.