Left Populism Has Become Mexico’s New Normal. At What Cost?

A left-populist party, Morena, has governed Mexico for six years. Last month, the hugely popular former president Andrés Manuel López Obrador – commonly known as Amlo – gave way to Claudia Sheinbaum Pardo, who has promised to continue the government’s leftwing direction. 

In the third-most populous country in the Americas, more known on the international left for the 30-year armed rebellion of the Zapatistas, this story is a font of lessons for a British left debating electoralism, the formation of new parties and the power of social movements. Novara Media spoke to organisers and thinkers in Mexico about how Morena won left hegemony on the United States’ doorstep – along with critics who say the costs of victory have been far too high.  

Building hegemony.

Morena’s achievements can’t be denied. Since coming to power in 2018, the party has extended pensions, raised the minimum wage, increased student grants, launched public works, reformed labour laws and passed constitutional amendments to recognise indigenous and Afro-Mexican communities. Between 2018 and 2022, around six million people moved out of official poverty, and the effective renationalisation of the oil and electricity sectors was the “recuperation of energy sovereignty,”* says Ignacio García Ponce, a historian and educator with agrarian workers. 

“López Obrador’s term was extraordinary, and it surpassed the expectations of many, including my own,” he says. “It changed the order of things. It initiated the end of neoliberalism, and gave the final kick to the authoritarian regime.”

All this was achieved with a party that barely existed a decade ago, and in a governance system dominated by traditional cliques. Amlo, a victim of suspected electoral fraud in the elections of 2006, broke from the Party of the Democratic Revolution (PRD) six years later, placing his bets on the success of a new left vehicle. 

“When he decided to separate, there was a movement that promoted his leadership,” explains Valeria Fontes, worker at the National Institute of Political Formation, the political education wing of Morena. “Andrés Manuel was a union leader. Many of the unions that worked with the PRD followed.” 

Fundamentally, Morena and Amlo built their popularity through a nationalist story of the Mexican nation’s rebirth. They called their project Mexico’s “fourth transformation”, placing themselves at the end of a line that runs through independence from Spain and the Mexican Revolution. Amlo’s discourses combined Mexican humanism (a sort of ecumenical Christian liberalism) with left-populist denunciations of the traditional elites. The former president had to circumvent a hostile private media and articulate these ideas directly to the people, in part through daily hours-long mañaneras, in part through constant visits to neglected regions of the country. 

“The most important thing was [that Amlo was] a leader who articulated the social demands,” says Fontes. “It wasn’t him that organised everything, but a figurehead is needed who can talk to everyone, who can connect with the people, who knows what they’re searching for.”

The costs of victory. 

Coming to power through established electoral processes rather than revolutionary state seizure inevitably required enormous compromises. In Fontes’ opinion, some in the social movements had to move past their “moral superiority”. 

“If you want to remain pure […], there are other spaces to do that,” she explains. “But if what you want is to transform reality, it’s composed of many other forces.”  

The overwhelming bulk of attacks on the Morena government come from the conservative and liberal right. But there are plenty on the Marxist and anarchist left with serious reservations too. One, María Vergara, was part of a wave of optimistic student activists who joined the Mexican civil service in the government’s early years. But she has become progressively more disillusioned with Morena, particularly over the phenomenon of chapulines (grasshoppers), leaders of the corrupt traditional parties who are invited into the Morena leadership. 

“We can’t have people from the old PRI,” she says, referring to the Institutional Revolutionary Party that ruled Mexico for most of the 20th century. “Why do you take in someone who doesn’t have political principles, or a political formation in the left, or a popular base? It’s here I think the party has betrayed its militants.”

Take Pedro Haces Barba, a former member of the PRI who heads both his business and the union it negotiates with; today, he’s a Morena deputy in the Mexican Congress opposing reductions in working hours and increased vacation days. For Vergara, Morena is now “a party that fights to maintain power, not for a leftist agenda”.

Unlike a 20th century communist party, Morena doesn’t define its base in a particular oppressed social class. Its basic “statement of principles” welcomes membership from professionals and business owners as much as workers and campesinos. According to Ponce, Amlo “didn’t base the struggle in a transformative subject […] he only made a very general distinction between the oligarchy and the people”. Not excluded on principle, Mexico’s bourgeoisie and corrupt politicos can infiltrate Morena and alter its character. 

Amlo didn’t, for example, shy away from making an alliance with the military, an institution he sees as a popular force dating back to the Mexican Revolution – but which to many Mexicans signifies forced disappearances, extortion, and the mind-bending body count of the recent US-backed ‘drug war’. Some suspect this alliance was behind Amlo’s failure to resolve the Ayotzinapa case: the mystery of 43 students who were disappeared or killed by municipal police in September 2014 under the PRI’s last president, Enrique Peña Nieto. Failure to progress the case has helped estrange Morena from the student population. 

Morena comes from “a nationalist left, at least in origin”, says Carlos Illades, author of numerous books on the Mexican left. “For Amlo, the army is the people […] the people armed.” As powerful as Morena’s nationalist narrative is electorally, it risks enforcing a homogeneous state on autonomous movements and populations like the Zapatistas of Chiapas. 

Illades says that for Amlo, “the state is home to solely one nation. And the Zapatistas are against that. There’s a contradiction.” The result, says Massimo Modonesi, politics professor at the National Autonomous University of Mexico, has been that “locally, at times Morena presents itself with a face that isn’t distinct from the old PRI, that operates with the same logic of control of territory, of corruption, of repression. In Chiapas, they’ve suffered this.”

Social struggle and left populism.

No-one Novara Media spoke to for this article, within or outside of Morena, labelled the project as explicitly anti-capitalist. “It hasn’t negated the capitalist system […] nor neoliberalism,” says Fontes. “That’s the way we develop [economically], we can’t propose something too different.” 

Rather, according to Modonesi, Morena’s programme has been to “stay well inserted in the global market” and to “combine that with strengthening the internal market”; but it hasn’t “modified the structure of the productive system” or Mexico’s position as an exporter of primary goods and a cheap labour source. “Only in particularly dark times,” argues Modonesi, “could we consider this an ambitious reformism”.

But we are, perhaps, in particularly dark times. In a continent rife with US-backed military coups and lawfare against progressives, leftist governments have to choose their confrontations carefully. When Morena recently moved to pass a reform of the judiciary, the elite backlash was intense. The peso fell in value amidst international condemnation and a relentless media campaign; a reminder of the sedimented resistance at the bottom of the political mug, ready to be whipped into a whirlpool at the slightest reformist stir.   

The question, from a left point of view, is whether a political project generates a reforming dynamic that propels it forward, rebuilding the capacity of popular sectors to push the project further and strengthen the government during its confrontations with capital. The key is to implement “non-reformist reforms”. 

As Ponce notes, obradorismo has achieved “massive popular participation, the recuperation of the state from the hands of the oligarchy […] to strongly debilitate the political right […] [and to] discredit completely the neoliberal ideology”. Along with reforms aimed at generating more democracy within the unions, these triumphs should help thaw Mexico’s long authoritarian winter, widening the space for social struggle. 

According to a recent academic investigation led by Modonesi, however, the incidence of social protest, strikes and conflicts has decreased during Amlo’s six years. “Viewed from the left, this isn’t good news,” he says, as the achievements of statist left-populism come “at the cost of promoting the mobilisation of social sectors, of autonomy”. 

Ponce, who is close to the rural campesino movement in Mexico, acknowledges the downtick in struggle. “There was a time of waiting. A vote of confidence,” he says, so the new government could “start resolving all these things”. In his view, the entire political landscape facing the extra-parliamentary left changed in 2018 when Amlo came to power – something it’s still figuring out.

“You can’t continue acting in the same way socially, politically or ideologically with this change,” he says. “[Mexico’s popular sectors are] in a new moment. Completely new.” 

Mysticism and reason.

Hundreds of thousands squeezed into Mexico City’s central square, El Zócalo, to watch the inauguration of Mexico’s first female president last month. As she read her 100 promises to the people, one could feel what’s sometimes called the mysticism of the fourth transformation: a collective spirit of national betterment carrying Mexico to a brighter future. Something quantitative analysis can’t easily account for. 

The task at hand, though, is to be steely-eyed interpreters, not mystics. Morena’s project can teach us much about the necessity of constructing a narrative of the country’s wayward trajectory – a trajectory the political left will place back on course. It illustrates the importance of having an honest, unifying leader who can speak directly to the people, bypassing the establishment media. It shows us the wisdom of choosing one’s battles, manoeuvring skillfully to build your forces and implement life-changing reforms.   

The Mexican experience also, perhaps, warns us. It warns of the risks of diluting a broad left-populist project at the altar of electoralism and political expediency. It warns that left-statism may smother class conflict and dampen social mobilisation. As Modonesi puts it: “The left requires two dynamics, one reformist and one antagonistic. You have to have the capacity to install social reforms, but also to sustain counter powers.”

Building something that can hold this contradiction in productive tension – a popular capture of the state that is energised by, rather than extinguishes, social struggles – is a task of utmost urgency in the UK and beyond. Mexico is feeling its way through this process.

*All quotes translated from Spanish.