What Mexico’s election results mean for future of Mexican politics

On the back of widespread frustration over endemic corruption and violence, Andres Manuel Lopez Obrador the 64-year-old former Mexico City mayor won 53% of Mexico vote. It’s the first time in Mexico modern history that a candidate has won more than half of the vote in a competitive election and is an unambiguous rejection of traditional parties. Obrador regularly used confrontation language when referring to Donald Trump but he is expected to focus ‘inwards’.

What is the result?

A baseball-loving left-wing nationalist who has vowed to crack down on corruption, rein in Mexico’s war on drugs and rule for the poor has been elected president of Latin America’s second-largest economy.

Andrés Manuel López Obrador, a silver-haired 64-year-old who is better known as AMLO, an acronym of his first initials, and counts Labour leader Jeremy Corbyn among his friends, has been elected with 53.7% of the vote.

López Obrador’s closest rival, Ricardo Anaya from the National Action Party (PAN), received 22.7%, while José Antonio Meade, a career civil servant running for the Institutional Revolutionary Party, or PRI, which ruled Mexico for most of last century, came in third with 15.4%.

He rode a public revolt against rampant crime, corruption, and poverty, handing a crushing defeat to the business-friendly parties who’ve run the country for decades. Long before those official results began to emerge, exit polls had shown Lopez Obrador so far ahead of his two main rivals that they conceded defeat - and congratulations had begun to pour in from foreign leaders, including Donald Trump. “I look very much forward to working with him,” the U.S. president, who’s repeatedly lambasted Mexico for sending illegal migrants and drugs across the border, said on Twitter.

Earlier in the day, Amlo, who has for months towered over his opponents in the polls, flashed a victory sign to reporters as he arrived to vote at a Mexico City polling station. “This is a historic day,” he said, calling the vote “a plebiscite in which people will choose between more of the same or genuine change”. As an estimated 89 million voters descended on polling stations on Sunday it became clear that Mexicans – fed up with political sleaze, soaring violence, and poverty - had overwhelmingly voted for change and to reject the only two parties to hold the presidency since the end of one-party rule in 2000.

“This country is in a deep hole and he’s the only one that can pull us out of it,” Manuel Molina, a 34-year-old advertising worker, said as he voted Amlo in Mexico City’s Tacubaya neighborhood. Civil servant Evelyn Correa said she was backing Amlo because she was tired of corrupt and shameless politicians: “He won’t resolve everything like he promises ... But we’ve tried the other parties. Hopefully, he’s different.”

In a televised address on Sunday, Lopez Obrador promised “deep changes” and said that while he’ll respect all Mexicans, “we’ll give preference to the poorest, and to the forgotten.” But he made a point of allaying market concerns too, promising to respect the central bank’s autonomy, avoid raising taxes in real terms, and stay within “legal channels” as he reviews oil deals approved under the outgoing president, Enrique Pena Nieto.

Amlo has repeatedly pledged to make eradicating corruption the main focus of his presidency, once he is sworn in on 1 December this year. “We will get rid of ... this cancer, that is destroying this country,” he vowed at his final campaign rally.

Why did he win?

Amlo has for years been one of the best-known politicians in Mexico. He has already run for the presidency twice before, losing both times by relatively small margins. But this time around, his folksy brand of leftist, Mexico-first rhetoric is a winner. And he is yet another politician to have one on a populist platform.

For many of the 89 million eligible Mexican voters, Sunday's election was a referendum on the country's political elite and its economic direction, as well as the tenure of President Enrique Peña Nieto, who was limited to a single 6-yr term.

Younger Mexicans, many of whom have grown up surrounded by rampant corruption and drug violence, were expected to have played a key role in choosing the country's direction. Nearly 13 million voters between the ages of 18 and 23 were expected to vote for the first time, according to election officials. Homicide rates soared to an all-time high under Peña Nieto, whom critics accused of failing to adequately deal with crime, corruption, and economic inequality.

The campaign itself was bloody, in a very literal sense. Since September 2017, 130 politicians were murdered including 48 political candidates, while many others were attacked. Over 200 political candidates gave up trying to get elected due to the threat of violence. Candidates challenging incumbents seemed to be the most likely target.

Amlo ran on a populist platform to break what he described as the grip that elites - or "power mafia" - have on Mexican society. He said he would lower the salaries of top officials and give those at the bottom a pay rise. He promised to sell the presidential planes and turn the presidential palace into a public park. He pledged to move out of the presidential palace into a more modest, older building, bolstering his image as a fighter against inequality. He has said that under him the government “will no longer be a committee at the service of one group, but a true representation of the people.”

In a country blighted by corruption and organized crime, Obrador promised to bring about change by redistributing Mexico’s wealth and ending impunity. He campaigned heavily in small towns and villages so he could be closer to “the people”, a strategy that earned him the label of “populist” from his political rivals, Jose Antonio Meade Kuribrena, of the centre-right PRI (Institutional Revolutionary Party), and Ricardo Anaya Cortes, of the conservative PAN (National Action Party).

López Obrador has pledged to prioritize the rural and indigenous groups that have been neglected by previous governments, promising infrastructure programs and fixed price for agricultural projects. He also wants to offer free education for the young and larger pensions for the old.

All of these spending pledges have led critics to warn he would take Mexico down the path of Venezuela, whose leftwing populist leaders have overseen a disastrous economic and humanitarian crisis. But Obrador says taxes will barely need to rise and that his programs will be paid for “with the savings from combatting corruption and cutting unnecessary costs.”

Where are the US-Mexico relations headed to?

US President Donald Trump congratulated AMLO in a tweet, saying he looked forward to working with him. "There is much to be done that will benefit both the United States and Mexico," Trump said.

Trump has badgered Mexico since he announced his candidacy, criticizing its migrants, threatening to abandon the North American Free Trade Agreement (NAFTA) and promising to build a wall between the two countries. Reflecting the current frostiness, Trump and his counterpart, Peña Nieto, still have not met since the American president took office.

Though a leftist, Obrador has drawn comparisons to Trump for his nationalist impulses, populist rhetoric, and combative personality. But from time to time he has also displayed aggression toward Mexico’s northern neighbor and has left no doubt that he is prepared to go toe-to-toe with Trump to defend Mexico’s interests.

Trump’s hardline stance on migration - particularly the separation of migrant families at the US border - has brought widespread condemnation. Some 2,000 children remain separated from their migrant parents, despite Trump agreeing to curtail the policy. Trump has continuously attacked Mexico over trade and migration and is unlikely to tone down his rhetoric anytime soon.

Mexico's new leader will have to contend with US President Donald Trump's threats to pull out of the NAFTA and his calls for the construction of a border wall between the two countries, among other divisive talking points.

Obrador, who at times led polls by as much as 20 points, told voters that he is the person for the job. He pushed back against plans for a border wall in a book he wrote titled "Oye Trump." He also pledged to propose to keep NAFTA, which is a free trade agreement between the US, Mexico, and Canada, intact. Obrador was the candidate most critical of Donald Trump and has said he will make the US president "see reason".

A cordial relationship between the two leaders seems necessary, with the two countries’ economies, public safety challenges and, in many cases, families, inextricably intertwined on a daily basis, but it is likely to be marked by tension. “We’re going to have two presidents looking inward,” said Celia Toro, an expert on international relations at El Colegio de Mexico. “Uncertainty is today’s defining feature,” added Toro.

This seismic change in Mexico’s political structure come at a time when relations with the US are especially fragile, with Trump’s humiliating comments igniting a unified demand for respect amongst Mexicans — and creating a highly unpredictable scenario for the two neighbors who, until Trump’s ascent to power, had a long, stable relationship characterized by robust cooperation.

Forging a successful relationship with Trump may become one of López Obrador’s biggest hurdles. The strategy to “make Donald Trump respect Mexico,” Arturo Sarukhan, former Mexico ambassador to the US, told BuzzFeed News, “is doomed to fail.” Trump’s view of Mexico is “first and foremost a personal issue, turbocharged by political-electoral necessity,” he added.

“Arrogant” and a “show off” are some of the adjectives López Obrador has used to describe Trump in recent months — though he, like the other candidates, mentioned Trump only a handful of times during the campaign period. Standing on a podium at a political rally in January, López Obrador made a reference to Trump’s border wall, saying that under his administration, investment in agriculture and a job creation scheme will keep people from going abroad. “Trump, or whoever is there, will come asking for Mexicans to go pick their crops,” he said forcefully.

Whatever tension could emerge between the two leaders, history and geography will leave them no choice but to find common ground. “There’s no other relationship where we have this degree of day to day effect on people’s lives on both sides of the border,” former US Ambassador to Mexico Earl Anthony Wayne, told, noting that the US and Mexico trade $1 million per minute. “It’s a marriage,” said Evan Ellis, Professor of Latin American Studies U.S. Army War College Strategic Studies Institute.

“It can be a good one or a bad one, but at the end of the day the US and Mexico are still wed.”

When did the journey begin for Obrador?

Born in 1953 to a family of modest means in the southeastern state of Tabasco, Lopez Obrador worked for the state's indigenous affairs bureau in the 1970s. He was a member of outgoing President Enrique Pena Nieto's PRI, but he quit the party in the late 1980s. He lost in Tabasco's governor race two times.

In 1994, after his second loss, he staged a protest march to the capital, helping raise his profile, especially during a time of growing opposition to the PRI. In 2000, he was elected mayor of Mexico City, where his administration was widely viewed as pragmatic, providing a springboard for his first bid at the presidency.

He ran for president in 2006 on promises to "put the poor first". Opponents likened him to then-President Hugo Chavez of Venezuela and launched a campaign branding him "a danger for Mexico". Fierce opposition from business groups may have cost him an election, which was decided by a razor-thin margin. After the loss, he claimed the system had been rigged against him. He then brought large swaths of the capital to a standstill for weeks with huge demonstrations and declared himself the legitimate president of Mexico.

The protests fizzled out and he began campaigning all over Mexico, speaking in villages that had not seen political leaders in years, sometimes to only a handful of people, according to Polimnia Romana Sierra, one of his aides from 2003 to 2011. "He spoke with the same energy under a tree in front of 10 people as he did in the full Zocalo," Sierra said, referring to the square in the heart of Mexico City that holds about 100,000 people. "Nobody works the microphone like him."

Lopez Obrador went back on the road after losing the presidential race again in 2012. He formed a new party, the National Regeneration Movement (MORENA), and by 2015, he was seen by many as someone who seemed poised to win the next election. As support for the PRI dropped over corruption scandals, record levels of violence and economic growth that fell short of expectations, Lopez Obrador's stature grew. "I can handle the dirt roads better now," a laughing Lopez Obrador told an audience of university students in April of this year. Part of that transformation has been attributed to Lopez Obrador's wife, Beatriz Gutierrez, a feminist who has broadened his appeal among female voters in Mexico.