Dave Graham -
Mexican leftist Andres Manuel Lopez Obrador has forged a coalition of voters of all stripes in a bid to win the presidency at the third time of asking and now, with victory within his grasp, he must work out how to hold it together.
The 64-year-old former mayor of Mexico City, whom opinion polls give a wide lead over rivals before the July 1 election, will have to balance the interests of leftist economic nationalists, social liberals and religious conservatives.
Aside from loyalty to AMLO himself, as Lopez Obrador is commonly known, the broad group is united by little more than opposition to the status quo and to US President Donald Trump.
Lopez Obrador has made a career of denouncing corruption, electoral fraud and economic mismanagement by the ruling Institutional Revolutionary Party (PRI) and the centre-right National Action Party (PAN), which governed from 2000 to 2012.
Yet, a week on Sunday, dozens of former politicians for the two parties will line up alongside him, amplifying his appeal to a wide swathe of the electorate but also creating a divergent platform with no clear centre of political equilibrium.
“The cohesive element in this whole mix of elements and ways of thinking is Andres Manuel Lopez Obrador,” said Abraham Gonzalez, a deputy interior minister in the last PAN government who now supports Lopez Obrador.
“So his actions, his ability to find common points of agreement, are crucial.”
So far Lopez Obrador has kept a lid on potential conflict within his alliance by adopting ambiguous stances on contentious issues including economic liberalisation.
Still, Mexico’s next president will face a more challenging start than his predecessors. Murders are at record levels, the peso currency is languishing close to historic lows against the dollar and a trade war has been brewing with Trump. However, the US president could prove useful. If Trump stays hostile, insisting Mexico will pay for his planned border wall and seeking to repatriate jobs to the United States, it could help Lopez Obrador paper over divisions on how to move Mexico forward.
“If Trump continues on the path he is on, he could easily help Lopez Obrador bring the country closer together,” said Andres Rozental, a former deputy foreign minister.
Opinion polls suggest Lopez Obrador could win twice as many votes as his nearest challenger, former PAN leader Ricardo Anaya, who is battling for second place with ex-finance minister Jose Antonio Meade, the PRI candidate.
After his defeat in 2012, Lopez Obrador jettisoned the leftist Party of the Democratic Revolution (PRD) and formed the National Regeneration Movement (MORENA), which is on track to become the biggest force in Congress after the election.
Built around Lopez Obrador, MORENA entered an electoral pact with the smaller leftist Labor Party (PT) and the conservative, religious Social Encounter Party (PES).
The latter tie-up met with vocal resistance from a number of Lopez Obrador’s traditional supporters on the left, uneasy about allying with the PES.
Aaron Lara, a senior PES official, said the alliance was “strictly electoral” and conceded his party was quite likely to vote differently to MORENA in future “because our convictions are different from theirs”. — Reuters
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