David Frum: “President Joe Biden’s next big foreign-policy crisis was waiting for him at his desk this morning: a southern neighbor heading fast toward authoritarianism and instability.
Over the past six years, Mexico’s autocratic president, Andrés Manuel López Obrador, has sought to subvert the multiparty competitive democracy that his country achieved in the 1990s. He has weakened the independent election agency that guaranteed free and fair elections. He has broken the laws and disregarded the customs that limited the president’s power to use the state to favor his preferred candidates. He has undermined the independence of the judiciary.
Mexican democracy gained a brief respite in 2021, when López Obrador lost his supermajority in Congress, removing his ability to rewrite the constitution at will. That respite temporarily reprieved the independence of the Mexican central bank and other government agencies not yet subordinated to direct presidential control. The electoral victory that López Obrador delivered to his chosen successor yesterday—59 percent of the presidential vote (as of this writing), apparently a large majority of the state governorships, almost certainly a restored supermajority in Congress—concentrates more power in López Obrador’s Morena party than any other Mexican government has wielded since the days of one-party rule.
The new Congress will take office on September 1; the new president will not do so until October 1. This means that, for a month, absolute power over the Mexican constitution will be in López Obrador’s hands.
López Obrador’s successor in the presidency is Claudia Sheinbaum, formerly the mayor of Mexico City. Sheinbaum will be the first woman to head the Mexican state, the first person of Jewish origin, the first from the academic left. These “firsts” will generate much excitement internationally. They should not obscure, however, her most important qualification: her career-long subservience to López Obrador.
Of the three candidates within the ruling party who vied for López Obrador’s favor, Sheinbaum was the one with the smallest and weakest following among Morena’s rank and file. Sheinbaum got the nod not because López Obrador wanted a pathbreaker, but because he wanted someone he could control after his mandatory departure from office at the end of a six-year term. López Obrador has built mechanisms to maintain his grip on Mexican politics, including a referendum at the presidency’s three-year mark, which provides a means of recalling López Obrador’s successor if she disappoints him and his following.
I interviewed Sheinbaum in Mexico City in January 2023. I found her highly intelligent but lacking in the people-pleasing ways of a professional politician. Most strikingly, she repeated every dogma of López Obrador ideology without a millimeter of distancing: The independent election commission was bad; the elections that López Obrador had lost earlier in his career were stolen from him; the act of replacing impersonal social-service agencies with personal handouts of cash from the presidential administration to the poor amounted to a social revolution equal to the other great transformations of the Mexican past, including the Mexican Revolution of 1913.”
Mexico is unfortunately completely ran by the cartels. This year was the most deadly for politicians there all across the country. As long as they don’t kill American tourists, the US won’t have to worry much about them
netropic on
Does Obrador’s legacy include any territorial ambitions? Are there any implications of the continuance of his policies for neighbouring countries? Could power be centralized enough to trigger a coup attempt? Love to hear from anyone educated on these topics.
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David Frum: “President Joe Biden’s next big foreign-policy crisis was waiting for him at his desk this morning: a southern neighbor heading fast toward authoritarianism and instability.
Over the past six years, Mexico’s autocratic president, Andrés Manuel López Obrador, has sought to subvert the multiparty competitive democracy that his country achieved in the 1990s. He has weakened the independent election agency that guaranteed free and fair elections. He has broken the laws and disregarded the customs that limited the president’s power to use the state to favor his preferred candidates. He has undermined the independence of the judiciary.
Mexican democracy gained a brief respite in 2021, when López Obrador lost his supermajority in Congress, removing his ability to rewrite the constitution at will. That respite temporarily reprieved the independence of the Mexican central bank and other government agencies not yet subordinated to direct presidential control. The electoral victory that López Obrador delivered to his chosen successor yesterday—59 percent of the presidential vote (as of this writing), apparently a large majority of the state governorships, almost certainly a restored supermajority in Congress—concentrates more power in López Obrador’s Morena party than any other Mexican government has wielded since the days of one-party rule.
The new Congress will take office on September 1; the new president will not do so until October 1. This means that, for a month, absolute power over the Mexican constitution will be in López Obrador’s hands.
López Obrador’s successor in the presidency is Claudia Sheinbaum, formerly the mayor of Mexico City. Sheinbaum will be the first woman to head the Mexican state, the first person of Jewish origin, the first from the academic left. These “firsts” will generate much excitement internationally. They should not obscure, however, her most important qualification: her career-long subservience to López Obrador.
Of the three candidates within the ruling party who vied for López Obrador’s favor, Sheinbaum was the one with the smallest and weakest following among Morena’s rank and file. Sheinbaum got the nod not because López Obrador wanted a pathbreaker, but because he wanted someone he could control after his mandatory departure from office at the end of a six-year term. López Obrador has built mechanisms to maintain his grip on Mexican politics, including a referendum at the presidency’s three-year mark, which provides a means of recalling López Obrador’s successor if she disappoints him and his following.
I interviewed Sheinbaum in Mexico City in January 2023. I found her highly intelligent but lacking in the people-pleasing ways of a professional politician. Most strikingly, she repeated every dogma of López Obrador ideology without a millimeter of distancing: The independent election commission was bad; the elections that López Obrador had lost earlier in his career were stolen from him; the act of replacing impersonal social-service agencies with personal handouts of cash from the presidential administration to the poor amounted to a social revolution equal to the other great transformations of the Mexican past, including the Mexican Revolution of 1913.”
Read more here: [https://theatln.tc/A3qLdrqP](https://theatln.tc/A3qLdrqP)
Mexico is unfortunately completely ran by the cartels. This year was the most deadly for politicians there all across the country. As long as they don’t kill American tourists, the US won’t have to worry much about them
Does Obrador’s legacy include any territorial ambitions? Are there any implications of the continuance of his policies for neighbouring countries? Could power be centralized enough to trigger a coup attempt? Love to hear from anyone educated on these topics.