Another year, another stream of sensationalist headlines out of Mexico: drug violence, femicide, the ongoing migrant crisis, and an economy that continues to fall short of its potential. All these problems existed before Mexico’s new president, Andrés Manuel López Obrador, took office last December. Yet in the past year, it has become increasingly clear that López, better known as AMLO, poses a genuine threat both to Mexican prosperity and democracy, his actions while governing bearing little resemblance to the progressive banner under which he ran.

Like many populists—from Venezuela’s Hugo Chávez and Brazil’s Jair Bolsonaro to Donald Trump himself—AMLO is a politician without any fixed ideology who nevertheless inspires cultlike devotion in his followers. Mexico would likely profit from a genuinely progressive, democratic governing party and president. Instead, an authoritarian figure promising easy, short-term solutions to immensely complex challenges is working to dismantle the substantial progress the country has already made.

AMLO was elected in July 2018 amid a wave of dissatisfaction with the weak and ineffective center-right and left governments that had governed since Mexico’s 71-year Institutional Revolutionary Party (PRI) regime voluntarily ceded power in 2000. The intervening period has seen positive advances: free elections, the building of independent institutions, and the diversification of the economy away from oil and agriculture toward tech and manufacturing. Yet the shift has left many behind: Mexico remains a country where over 40 percent of the population live in poverty, and political power brokers and other vested interests remain untouchable by the law. 2019 is estimated to have seen a record number of homicides.

On the campaign trail in 2018, AMLO promised Mexicans a “Fourth Transformation”—following Mexican Independence, the separation of church and state, and its 1910 Revolution—yet his actual policy positions were vague. He would reduce social inequality by “ending privileges”; corruption would be “eradicated”; the country’s deadly drug war would be “over.” Such rhetoric played well in a country where the intricacies of representative democracy, hamstrung by weak leadership and dysfunctional institutions, have left citizens disillusioned. A 2017 survey by the Pew Research Center found that only 6 percent of Mexicans were satisfied with their democracy and only 17 percent claimed any confidence in the graft-plagued administration of Enrique Peña Nieto that preceded AMLO.

Yet the first year of AMLO’s term unfolded quite differently than his supporters on the progressive and center-left, both in Mexico and the United States, had hoped. From a Donald Trump–backed crackdown on migration—over 29,000 undocumented migrants were detained by Mexican authorities in June alone, a 204 percent increase over the same month the previous year—to AMLO’s ambiguous views on abortion, same-sex marriage, and drug reform, there is little of U.S.-style progressivism in his administration.