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When Mexican voters head to the polls on Sunday, they will in effect be giving a thumbs-up or -down to their president of the last six years, Andrés Manuel López Obrador. AMLO, as he is known, cannot run again since Mexico gives its presidents only one six-year term. But his protegée, Claudia Sheinbaum, is widely seen as the person who will carry on his populist legacy. While polls indicate Sheinbaum will win, a loss will still see Mexico elect its first female president—the candidate running second in the polls is Xóchitl Gálvez, a tech entrepreneur representing three opposition parties.
While AMLO is popular, in part because of his deployment of subsidies and direct cash transfers, he has eroded pillars of democracy such as the judiciary and media. What would a vote for continuity mean for Mexico and the world? I spoke with Arturo Sarukhán, a former Mexican ambassador to the United States who now runs his own consulting firm. Subscribers can watch the full discussion on the video box atop this page, or follow the FP Live podcast on Apple or Spotify. What follows is a condensed and lightly edited transcript.
Ravi Agrawal: Why is AMLO so popular, despite having weakened state institutions, the judiciary, and some would say democracy itself?
Arturo Sarukhán: First of all, you need a bit of context because he is indeed popular. His approval ratings have never dipped below 55 percent or 56 percent. But if you compare his popularity ratings with his predecessors—except his immediate predecessor, Enrique Peña Nieto—every single Mexican president at this stage of their tenure had similar or higher approval ratings.
Now, having said this, one of the reasons that explains López Obrador’s enduring approval ratings is that he is probably the most successful retail politician that Mexico has seen in its modern history. This is a man who, after losing presidential bids in 2006 and 2012, dedicated 12 years of his life to traverse the country. Probably no one understands the psyche of Mexicans as López Obrador does. And more importantly, I think, for a very important segment of Mexicans, they feel that he has given them a voice and made them visible when they were invisible. Obviously, all of this is aided by the very generous, non-conditional cash transfers that have been a hallmark of his tenure. Plus the fact that he did push through the first significant increase to the minimum wage in Mexico.
But having said all of this, there is a split screen between his popularity and the approval citizens have of specific public policies: security, access to health care, jobs, the cost of energy. On all of these, his marks are pretty low. But his popularity is what has kept him afloat so far at this stage of his administration.
RA: So, the surrogate of someone who is seen as weakening pillars of democracy could end up winning, democratically.
AS: That is why this election is so critical, Ravi. I’m not suggesting that this is Venezuela by any margin, but during these past almost six years, there has been a slippery slope of democratic weakening of checks and balances, of autonomous bodies and of regulators. He has railed against the Supreme Court. In fact, he has suggested that Supreme Court justices be chosen by popular vote instead of being nominated by the president and then voted on by the Mexican Senate. In many ways, I’ve always said that [former U.S. President] Donald Trump and Andrés Manuel López Obrador are twins from a different mother, because they resort to this black and white, “us-versus-them” thinking. It’s the “mafia of power” in the case of López Obrador and the “deep state” in the case of Donald Trump. And this has allowed him to mobilize his base of hardcore voters.
Morena, the party that he created to run in 2018, is one of these very, very big tents of strange bedfellows. You’ve got the old, hardcore Mexican left; you’ve got evangelists; you’ve got people who abandoned the PRI [Institutional Revolutionary Party]. It’s a big-tent political party. But one of the big questions is obviously when López Obrador leaves office, whether that big-tent coalition—with someone who may not be as charismatic as he is, with someone who may not have that ability to galvanize and keep the party under control—will start showing some of these tectonic ideological fissures.
RA: And you’re referring, there, to Claudia Sheinbaum. Tell us a little bit about her. At a basic level, we know that she’s a former climate scientist. She’s largely running on the success of her time as mayor of Mexico City. But how is she seen across the country? And what do we know about how she might be different from López Obrador?
AS: It’s not clear whether she will be able to wean herself from President López Obrador if she wins on Sunday. Yes, she is trained as a scientist. But during her term as mayor of Mexico City, air pollution in Mexico has gone through the roof again, when it had been relatively under control in the past decade. The issue that is critically important for Mexico’s future well-being and prosperity: energy and energy policy and energy prices. These are critically important to attract some of the nearshoring happening as the United States recalibrates its relationship with China. She has basically said she will double down on López Obrador’s energy policies, which focus on fossil fuels, which have done little to promote renewables, which put [state-controlled oil company] Pemex and [state utility company] CFE at the core of energy policies. So there are several contradictions.
RA: What about the other main candidate, Xóchitl Gálvez?
AS: Xóchitl Gálvez is the candidate for a coalition of opposition parties. Therein lies one of the problems that she faces, because these traditional parties have a very bad reputation amongst many Mexicans, especially on corruption. She is running on a coalition that includes the PRI, the party that ruled Mexico consecutively for 71 years, and the PAN [National Action Party], which was in office for 12 years after the PRI was kicked out of power. Xóchitl Gálvez, who despite being a senator for the center-right PAN, is seen as an independent. But the baggage of these traditional coalition parties that are behind her is a drag on her candidacy.
I think one of the most interesting features of Xóchitl Gálvez is that in many ways, she is a perfect foil to López Obrador. She’s folksy. She also engages very well with Mexicans at the grassroots level. She comes from an Indigenous background. Again, she’s a self-made businesswoman and engineer. This makes her very attractive to a big chunk of Mexican voters who voted for López Obrador in 2018 and have been disillusioned by López Obrador’s polarizing “us-versus-them” narrative. I think that’s where a lot of her votes will come from on Sunday. But a challenge she faces is how to present herself as a candidate that isn’t beholden to these three traditional political parties that are backing her as their coalition candidate.
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RA: There are fears that Morena could become more and more powerful, and the cult of personality that AMLO has deployed could end up weakening key institutions, which then has longer-term repercussions across the board.
AS: Absolutely. I am concerned that, in many ways, we’re seeing the return of the PRI reloaded. López Obrador cut his teeth as a PRI politician in the 1960s and 1970s. All in all, he is a PRI politician to the marrow. His positions regarding, for example, a top-down economy, the role of the state-run oil and utilities companies. He is a true nationalist. And he sees Mexico and the world through the lens of what they looked like in the 1970s.
The role that he has given the armed forces is beyond public security. For the first time since the Mexican Revolution, the armed forces are playing a role in public policies that have nothing to do with national defense. Building refineries. Building airports. Building railways. Running a new airline, running customs and maritime ports. Why has López Obrador done this? Because he wants to ensure that by bringing the armed forces in, as co-stakeholders of some of his pet projects, it’s much harder for whoever follows him to pull a U-turn and reverse course and shut down some of these boondoggles.
And so, the role of the armed forces, the weakening of Mexico’s democratic pillars, all of this has an impact on the resilience of Mexico’s democracy. I think that we could be facing an illiberal democracy in Mexico if these policies continue. And it has a brutal impact on relations with Mexico’s most important diplomatic partner, which is the United States. And remember, Mexico is now the no. 1 trading partner of the United States, and it is the no. 1 exporter of goods to the United States. So what happens in Mexico on the other side of the border has profound implications for the well-being, security, and prosperity of the United States.
RA: How do you explain the rise of crime, despite how militarized the state is?
AS: At the end of the day, the public security paradigm that López Obrador came into the presidency with is completely broken. He ran on a mantra of “hugs, not bullets,” meaning that he aimed to emphasize harm reduction and address some of the social dynamics that lead to violence and organized crime in Mexico. But the endgame has been that his “hugs, not bullets” paradigm has turned into a “hugs for thugs” paradigm. What we have today is basically a Pax Narca. The decision not to frontally confront organized crime in many ways explains the rising levels of criminal organization and violence. It explains the rising levels of fentanyl trafficking into the United States, which has huge public health consequences for the United States.
And we also see it troublingly in the encroachment of organized crime in political electoral processes. We saw it really rear its head in the midterms in 2021, when organized crime either suppressed or whipped the vote in favor of Morena. Now the big fear, with these 34 candidates murdered so far in this electoral cycle, is that come Sunday, we may see organized crime rearing its head again, not only in terms of intimidating candidates that they don’t like, but also in terms of suppressing the vote, like we saw in the midterms, by shutting down polling places, by not allowing people to vote, by intimidating voters. And that is a big red flashing light on Mexico’s horizon.
RA: Mexico’s economy is now the 14th biggest in the world. GDP per capita is fairly high at around $12,000 a year—pretty much at China’s levels and four or five times India’s. Mexico is solidly a middle-income country. But I’m curious how López Obrador’s policies can continue given how much of it is based around direct cash transfers, subsidies, increasing the minimum wage amidst all the other problems you talked about?
AS: This has been an Achilles’ heel of Mexico, along with impunity and a weak rule of law. If you look at Mexican growth, it’s been hovering around 2 percent to 3 percent annually for the past decade and a half. Mexico grows, but it doesn’t grow at the rates that it could be growing, particularly given its anchoring into the North American economy via NAFTA and NAFTA’s successor agreement, the USMCA [United States-Mexico-Canada Agreement]. Given the once-in-a-generation opportunity that Mexico has because of Washington’s recalibration, particularly on economic and trade policy toward China, this could really become the North American century. Canada, the United States, and Mexico—by further deepening their supply chains, by de-risking production platforms, by bringing them closer to the U.S. heartland in the U.S. itself or in Mexico—could really have a unique opportunity.
If you look at energy, there’s a huge opportunity for the three North American countries to develop a common paradigm of energy efficiency, security, resilience, sustainability, independence. But López Obrador’s energy policies focus mainly on fossil fuels, do not invest in renewables, maintain control of the utilities and the oil company.
Yes, nearshoring investment is coming into Mexico, but it’s not coming into the country at the levels that it should given our infrastructure. The fact that we have a 3,000-kilometer border with the United States. This geographic proximity, the infrastructure, the modernization of NAFTA into USMCA, and the lessons that we learned from the pandemic about the role that these integrated supply chains play. All of these should provide Mexicans with a unique opportunity to really boost economic development. But a lot of that hinges on decreasing public insecurity, enhancing investment in infrastructure, and most critically, a significant U-turn in Mexico’s energy policies.
RA: AMLO often said that the “best foreign policy is a good domestic policy.” Talk to us a little bit about why he’s been so absent from the world stage.
AS: He’s the most parochial president Mexico has had. I said at the outset that he was the most sophisticated retail politician. He is the most unsophisticated and parochial politician Mexico has had when it comes to foreign affairs and foreign policy. López Obrador has seldom traveled abroad. He never went to a U.N. General Assembly. He never participated in one of the G-20 summits. So Mexico, which tends to punch below its weight in the international arena, now isn’t even getting into the ring. And the president couldn’t care less. He’s not interested in foreign policy. And when he does get involved in foreign policy, the consequences are abysmal. López Obrador states that Latin America is the region that he’s most interested in. Well, it’s very interesting to see that the region that he is most interested in is responsible for declaring three of his ambassadors persona non grata because López Obrador meddled in the internal domestic political affairs of those countries. He was, along with [Chinese President] Xi Jinping and [Russian President] Vladimir Putin, the last of the heads of state to recognize Joe Biden’s victory in 2020, and that’s Mexico’s most important diplomatic partner.
RA: If we assume that Claudia Sheinbaum is going to win, will her foreign policy be any different?
AS: First of all, I think that we have to wait and see what happens on Sunday. Having said that, I don’t think you’ll see a significant difference. There will be a change in style, which is fortunate. I don’t think you’ll see some of the histrionics that have characterized López Obrador’s infrequent incursions into foreign policy. I think she will be much more kosher. I think she will be less inclined to dabble into foreign policy from the presidential bully pulpit. But I think that you will see much of the same ideological bent that you’ve seen in Andrés Manuel López Obrador’s foreign policy. In fact, one could argue that given López Obrador is barely interested in foreign policy, what he has done is more transactional than ideological. He bent the knee when Trump threatened him with tariffs if he didn’t stop transmigration flows from Mexico into the United States. Biden didn’t put a gun to López Obrador’s head, but also asked for support from Mexico to stem those flows. And he has basically acquiesced. But at the end of the day, it’s—I don’t think it’s really ideology.
I think Claudia Sheinbaum is much more ideological when it comes to foreign policy than López Obrador. She comes from a tradition of the hard left in Mexico. A Cuba: yes, Yankees: no, type of worldview. I don’t think we will see significant changes in the direction of Mexican foreign policy. Mexico will be breaking a glass ceiling before the U.S. does by electing its first woman president, so she may be more inclined to go to, for example, the U.N. General Assembly and the G-20 summit.
Now, obviously, a lot of that will depend on what happens in the United States come November. If Trump were to return to power, given that, unfortunately, all roads of the Republican presidential campaign lead through the border with Mexico to migrants, to border security, to organized crime. With this narrative in the Republican Party, that it’s not really Russia or Taiwan or the Middle East or the Persian Gulf that really impacts U.S. national security. It’s the border with Mexico. Trump has promised to deport millions of undocumented migrants, 5 million of whom are Mexican. He has promised to slap tariffs on all exports coming into the U.S., when again, Mexico is the largest trading partner of the United States. He has promised to unilaterally use force to confront organized crime operating in Mexico. So the wheels of the bilateral relationship could very quickly fall off with that scenario.
RA: And if we see a second Biden term?
AS: A Biden 2.0 administration will basically keep the relationship on an even keel. I think Biden has been the adult in this bilateral relationship. He obviously, because of the need to secure Mexican collaboration, decided not to confront López Obrador on domestic political issues. With the potential exception of fentanyl trafficking, and one or two trade disputes, he does not put pressure on López Obrador on bilateral policy fronts. If he wins again in November, it would probably ease some of the pressure and you would probably see a Biden 2.0 administration flexing its muscles a bit more in regards to Mexico, Mexican domestic politics and U.S.-Mexico bilateral affairs. But I think you’d see a continuation of what we’ve seen so far during the current Biden administration.
RA: Mexico could, as you’ve said, do more to cash in on its proximity to the United States. But it also has this reputation of not being business-friendly. What needs to change in the future?
AS: López Obrador is a very top-down manager. He micromanages, but for those issues that he really doesn’t care about, each cabinet secretary and department is left to its own devices. You need to create greater synergy. You need to relaunch institutions that López Obrador disbanded—for example, Mexico’s trade and investment agency, which he shuttered on day one of his administration.
But also, you need to enhance your ability to provide public security. This requires a whole new paradigm, not only of Mexican internal public security policies, but also of bilateral collaboration with the United States. As with most issues in this U.S.-Mexico bilateral relationship, transnational problems require transnational solutions. And then finally, again, this critical issue of Mexico’s energy policy paradigm, which is completely unsynced from Canadian and U.S. energy policies. We need to align those policies so that we can diminish the costs of energy in Mexico, so that we can enhance the percentage of energy being produced by renewable means and clean energy, because that increasingly is a demand from not only stockholders, but also boards and CEOs and companies.
All of this needs to come together to be able to take advantage of what I think is a unique opportunity in Mexico’s recent history.