At that time, 48% of voters with a college degree supported MORENA’s congressional candidates. In the 2018 election, working-class votes were scattered across different parties, including the neoliberal bloc, while AMLO had an edge with middle-class professionals. This verbal shift was matched by a stark process of party realignment. Yet under AMLO it reemerged in Laclauian guise: as a confrontation between ‘the people’ and ‘the elite’ ( fifis and machuchones as he mockingly calls them), the latter defined by their wealth, meritocratic self-delusion and disdain for working-class culture. Class antagonism had all but disappeared from mainstream commentary. Public officials increasingly conceded the necessity of increasing ‘citizen control’ over ‘governance’. Previously, political discourse focused on the division between a vaguely defined ‘civil society’ and the state. The first signs of its realization were rhetorical. It was a bold statement, more of an aspiration than a fait accompli. Just a few months into his presidency, AMLO declared the death of Mexican neoliberalism. ‘The workers…the workers move Mexico!’ For many, the scene captured the return of class politics to public consciousness after a long absence. From the window of a public bus, an anonymous passenger begins to harangue the motorists: ‘ This is what moves Mexico!’ he says. It shows throngs of upper-class demonstrators engaged in a march-by-car on a major avenue in Monterrey, Nuevo León. In May 2020, as the first right-wing protests erupted against AMLO’s government, a viral video made the rounds on social media. We can therefore assess AMLO’s administration based on three fundamental criteria: the reinstatement of class cleavage as a primary organizer of the political field the effort to reconcentrate the power of a state apparatus hollowed out by decades of neoliberal governance and the break with an economic paradigm based on institutionalized corruption. Let’s consider each of these in turn. It follows that the basic historical task of the contemporary left is the reignition of class politics and the relegitimation of the state as a social actor. To what extent has he succeeded, and what can the left learn from this endeavour?Īs a general rule, transitions from neoliberalism must take place in a structural setting shaped by neoliberalism itself: the erosion of the working class as a political agent and the dismantling of state capacity. His overarching project has been to move away from neoliberalism towards a model of nationalist-developmentalist capitalism. Yet as his six-year term reaches its final lap, a closer look at AMLO’s record reveals a much more complex picture. These groups have variously accused him of ‘turning the country into Venezuela’, peddling ‘conservativism’ and acting as a ‘henchman of capital’. The idiosyncrasies of AMLO’s left-populist presidency have pitted him not only against the neoliberal right, but also against the ‘progressive’ cosmopolitan intelligentsia and neozapatista-adjacent autonomists. Longstanding rivalries between the opposition parties have been shelved, with the PRI, PAN and PRD forced to come together or forfeit any possibility of succeeding at the ballot box. Today, the president’s approval ratings remain in the sixties, despite a relentlessly hostile press, a global pandemic, its accompanying economic crisis and inflationary pressures. The parties that had dominated the political field throughout the neoliberal period were suddenly reduced to rubble. This was by far the widest margin since the country’s ‘transition to democracy’ at the turn of the millennium. The Mexican political system was shaken on 1 July 2018, when Andrés Manuel López Obrador (AMLO) and his new party MORENA achieved a resounding electoral victory, winning 53% of the votes in a four-way race – a thirty-point lead over his closest contender.
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