Andrés Manuel López Obrador Brings an Aggressive Approach to the Presidency

A lengthy transition period has given Mexicans a preview of how the fiery leftist leader will run his six-year term.
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Five months after he won a landslide victory in Mexico's 2018 presidential election on promises to "transform" the country, leftist Andrés Manuel López Obrador was sworn into office on December 1st.

The prolonged transition period—currently one of the the world's lengthiest—gave Mexicans a preview of what presidential leadership will look like under López Obrador: aggressive.

Between its July 1st election and December 1st inauguration, Mexico was effectively been run by parallel governments with very different agendas. President Enrique Peña Nieto, Mexico's conservative and highly unpopular outgoing leader, all but disappeared from the public eye, even as tensions with the United States over the treatment of Central American migrants run high.

Meanwhile, López Obrador was increasingly visible, offering asylum and temporary work permits to refugees, pushing his legislative priorities, and deciding the fate of major infrastructure projects—though, strictly speaking, he could not follow through on any of these decisions as president-elect.


A Regressive Transformation of Mexico

As president-elect, López Obrador unilaterally called two "people's polls," circumventing a constitutional requirement that all popular referenda be approved by the Supreme Court and administered by the national election authority.

In October, his Morena party hired a private polling firm to ask Mexicans in 538 towns near the nation's capital to vote on whether to cancel Mexico City's controversial, extravagantly over-budget, and environmentally disastrous—but much-needed—new international airport.




As engineers, academics, and the business sector also denounced the decision to scrap the new airport, the Mexican peso plummeted amid investor concern about national stability.

López Obrador responded to criticism with a populist evasion, saying simply that "the people are wise."

A month later, López Obrador's transitional government called another unconstitutional referendum to decide the fate of another major infrastructure project. In late November, 900,000 voters determined that the Mexican government should build the "Maya Train," a 932-mile rail line that would connect five southern Mexican states and the Yucatan Peninsula.



Mexico's Powerful Presidency

López Obrador's misuse of direct democracy to expand his executive powers sends worrisome signals about how he will govern Mexico.



López Obrador, a former Mexico City mayor who has unsuccessfully run for president twice before, won this year in large part because he promised to make Mexico's centralized, stagnant political system more inclusive and consultative.

He pledged to root out corruption, reduce violence, restructure Mexico's energy sector, respect the human rights of migrants, and spur growth in the country's most impoverished areas.


His political party, Morena, secured majorities in both the Mexican Senate and lower Chamber of Deputies in July's election. That also gives López Obrador the right to replace up to two justices on Mexico's Supreme Court.

Extreme Austerity




López Obrador justifies the downsizing by quoting Benito Juárez, the celebrated indigenous president who ruled Mexico from 1858 to 1872. Juárez thought public officials should live in "honorable modesty," avoiding idleness and excess.

Few doubt that Mexico's government bureaucracy is bloated, and that expunging the rampant corruption of Peña Nieto's PRI party will require serious restructuring. However, the working conditions López Obrador proposes violate Mexican labor standards, which guarantee job security and an eight-hour work day.

There's a logistical problem here too. Implementing López Obrador's ambitious policy agenda asks a lot of Mexico's federal government. The president-elect now intends to transform his nation with an underpaid, overworked, and understaffed bureaucracy.

Broken Promises



The security plan was underdeveloped, and when pressed for details on the campaign trail, López Obrador simply responded that Mexico needs "justice," not "revenge."

But voters recognized the sound logic behind his diagnosis. Numerous studies show that Mexico's military crackdown on organized crime actually caused violence to skyrocket.

The number of criminal groups operating in Mexico surged from 20 in 2007, the year after the full-frontal war on drugs began, to 200 in 2011, according to the Mexican university CIDE. By last year, Mexico had 85 homicides a day—the highest murder rate since record-keeping began in the 1980s.

López Obrador has since radically changed his strategy for "pacifying" Mexico.


Mexican political pundit Denise Dresser has dubbed López Obrador's strategy as the current cartel war "on steroids." Security expert Alejandro Madrazo wrote in the New York Times that the decision is a "historic error" that squanders the opportunity to have a national dialogue about the role of the military in law enforcement.

Mexicans gave López Obrador a mandate to revolutionize the government so that it finally works for them. His power grabs, austerity budget, and U-turn on security are early signs that he may not deliver the transformation they so eagerly await.

This article was originally published on The Conversation. Read the original article. Luis Gómez Romero is a Senior lecturer in human rights, constitutional law, and legal theory at the University of Wollongong.