The story has never failed to entrance a foreign audience: An outspoken leftist committed to social justice wins a landslide presidential victory in Latin America. Headlines last July for 65-year-old Andrés Manuel López Obrador proclaimed the familiar tale. Mexico’s poor, marginalized, and forgotten had elected a man who would truly represent them: a plain-talking, frugally living southerner who would stamp out corruption and give voice to the voiceless.

Yet with his promises to increase state economic intervention and potentially reverse Mexico’s market reforms of the past 30 years, AMLO, as he is known, polarizes opinion. Supporters, both at home and abroad, believe he and his National Regeneration Movement party (Morena) are the antidote to the neoliberal policies that have left the country mired in gang violence and inequality. Critics, meanwhile, compare him to Venezuela’s Hugo Chávez—a potential authoritarian who will wreck the economy.

Mexico’s challenges since transitioning from one-party-rule to democracy in the 1990s are so numerous and complex—corruption, drug violence, the rule of law—that the most probable outcome is that AMLO, like his predecessors, merely disappoints. Yet there’s ample reason to suspect those dubbing him the “Mexican Bernie Sanders” are misreading the situation: projecting southwards an American leftist fantasy that fails to engage with Mexican reality. The man who has vowed to initiate Mexico’s “Fourth Transformation” is not free of flaws. And some of them come uncomfortably close to those which have long led the left astray in Latin America.

It is debatable whether AMLO, who was sworn in December 1, won July’s election because of a longing by Mexicans to see the left return to power, or simply because of widespread disenchantment with their entire political class. Former president Enrique Peña Nieto’s six-year term was beset by corruption scandals, drug violence, and a batch of pro-market structural reforms that have yet to benefit the majority of the population. Exhibiting equal parts arrogance and incompetence, the centrist Institutional Revolutionary Party (PRI) politician symbolized the very worst of Mexico’s ruling class. The 2018 election could credibly be read as the country’s “Trump moment,” a desire for something—anything—different.

Mexico, for all the catastrophizing by politicians, the media, and NGO researchers, remains a country in flux rather than crisis. Its violent crime rate, while the source of horrific massacres and mass disappearances, is lower than those of Venezuela, Brazil, or Colombia. Its burgeoning high-tech and manufacturing sectors are the most productive and innovative in Latin America. And its current economic performance—relatively low, if consistent, growth—while disappointing to many, can be considered an improvement on the 20th century when Mexico lurched from crisis to crisis, depending on oil prices.