Opinion

Mexico's presidential frontrunner is promising a revolution. Can he deliver?

Andres Manuel Lopez Obrador, presidential candidate of the National Regeneration Movement Party, gestures to the crowd during the final campaign rally at the Estadio Azteca in Mexico City, Mexico, on June 27, 2018. less Andres Manuel Lopez Obrador, presidential candidate of the National Regeneration Movement Party, gestures to the crowd during the final campaign rally at the Estadio Azteca in Mexico City, Mexico, on June 27, ... more Photo: Bloomberg Photo By Alejandro Cegarra. Photo: Bloomberg Photo By Alejandro Cegarra. Image 1 of / 51 Caption Close Mexico's presidential frontrunner is promising a revolution. Can he deliver? 1 / 51 Back to Gallery

After two failed attempts, Andrés Manuel López Obrador is on the verge of becoming Mexico's next president. According to opinion polls, the 64-year-old leftist has a likely insurmountable lead ahead of Sunday's election, buoyed by widespread anti-establishment sentiment. Sitting in the United States, there's a temptation to view the Mexican vote through the prism of President Trump, a deeply unpopular figure south of the border. But the support for López Obrador - or Amlo, as he's commonly called - is far more about revulsion with the domestic status quo than the current occupant of the White House, no matter what he says about a border wall and who will pay for it.

The signature theme of López Obrador's campaign has been a sweeping message of anti-corruption, including promises he himself has made to forgo the perks of office and convert Mexico's lush presidential palace into a public park. His opponents, meanwhile, have failed to shrug off the stigma of graft and abuse of power surrounding their parties and remain linked to a mess of ongoing scandals, as well as the spiraling violence surrounding the country's notorious drug cartels. Outgoing President Enrique Peña Nieto and his ruling Institutional Revolutionary Party, or PRI, is a widely discredited, lame-duck politician; his appointed successor, José Antonio Meade, is a distant third in polling.

"This election really began to cease being political a few months ago and became emotional," Mexican essayist Emiliano Monge told the New Yorker. "It is more than anything a referendum against corruption, in which, as much by right as by cleverness, Amlo has presented himself as the only alternative. And in reality he is."

Now, López Obrador, who has a long political career of championing the plight of the poor, sees himself on the precipice of a new revolution, especially if his party, the National Regeneration Movement, also captures decisive control of Congress. "Mexico was ruled by one party from 1929 to 2000, and its presidents since then have come from one of two mainstream parties, the PRI and the [conservative] PAN," the Washington Post has written. "This year, a man from outside the country's conventional political orbit is not only in close contention - he's leading by a wide margin."

"On the campaign trail [López Obrador] says that a 'fourth transformation' of Mexico is coming, after independence in 1821, a civil war and liberal reforms in the 1850s and 1860s, and a revolution that began in 1910," noted the Economist. "The change will be 'as profound' as the revolution, but 'without violence,' he promises. He vows to overthrow the 'mafia of power,' that he believes holds back Mexico."

But what will this change look like? While López Obrador summons the nation-building legacies of pioneering Mexican leaders like Benito Juárez and Lázaro Cárdenas, his critics cast him in line with Venezuela's late Hugo Chávez and populist strongmen further to the south. They warn of a regressive, leftist agenda and the risk of delusional demagoguery - what led the popular Mexican historian Enrique Krauze to dub López Obrador the "tropical messiah" during an election campaign in 2006.

These concerns, argue many analysts, are somewhat overstated now. "I don't think Mexico would tolerate another Chavez," Jorge Guajardo, a former Mexican ambassador to China, told this column. "But he does have some authoritarian instincts that need to be checked," referring to López Obrador's penchant of attacking opponents in the media.

"The fears that López Obrador, in lacking a political counterweight, may become too powerful are well founded," journalist Guillermo Osorno wrote in the New York Times. "But his diagnosis of what Mexico needs - a stronger domestic economy and an end to corruption - and his strategy to deal with violence, including a vast program to support the young people who have been caught up in the war against drugs, are on target."

Moreover, despite his vehement opposition to the establishment, López Obrador has softened his tone, courting a wide spectrum of support from business leaders, trade unionists and the political old guard. "If he were seen as a real threat," Alfredo Coutino of Moody's Analytics told the Associated Press earlier this month, "I think the markets would be moving very strongly and we would be seeing investment decisions postponed or withdrawn." That is, thus far, not the case.

If anything, he may co-opt elements of the PRI, which dominated Mexico for much of the last century but now is on the verge of collapse. "The PRI is no longer of any real positive use to anyone in Mexico. Or outside Mexico - where the party's grievous governance has only emboldened Donald Trump's racist slur that the country is a lair of 'bad hombres,' " wrote Tim Padgett, a Miami-based commentator on Latin American affairs. "Even the PRI's Orwellian name - we're institutional and revolutionary! - evokes a soulless transnational corporation more than of a meaningful political movement."

Like his rival candidates for the presidency, López Obrador has been bitterly critical of Trump, as well as Peña Nieto's widely mocked and rather humiliating attempts to find common cause with the White House. But he won't necessarily be any more confrontational when in power. If Trump decides to ax NAFTA, for example, some experts suggest López Obrador will take the move far more in stride than other politicians in the Mexican mainstream.

"AMLO is a nationalist and focused on addressing domestic problems," wrote Ana Quintana of the right-wing Heritage Foundation in Washington. "The U.S. should anticipate a reduction in cooperation on regional challenges that don't directly concern Mexico. We should expect Mexico to draw down their leadership on the Venezuela crisis, as AMLO's foreign minister in waiting told me in a meeting,"

And if conversations between him and Trump, two vocal populists, go badly, we will almost certainly know about it. "I do think that if Trump tries to humiliate him, AMLO will be extremely comfortable walking away and stoking nationalist feelings against the United States in Mexico," said Guajardo.

For now, though, many of his supporters aren't taking his victory for granted, dreading electoral malfeasance by the powers-that-be. "If they steal it, this city, the country, will explode," one Amlo supporter told my colleagues at a rally this week. "They have been warned."