On Sunday, July 1st, 2018, Mexico voted for a new President, Congress, and numerous local officials, making this the biggest election in the country's history. While the results were not a shock to those following the polls, they will certainly send political shockwaves not only through Mexico, but across the globe.
First and most importantly is Andrés Manuel López Obrador—"AMLO" for short— the left-leaning populist President-elect who had absolutely dominated in the polls. Now, those who follow American politics are most likely familiar with Bernie Sanders, the socialist Vermont Senator who came surprisingly close to winning the Democratic Presidential Nomination in 2016. Well, Sanders and Obrador have a surprising amount of things in common. Like the dear Senator, AMLO began his political career as a mayor, specifically the Mayor of Mexico City. AMLO had also long also been considered a fringe politician, running for and losing the presidency twice in favor of establishment candidates before a wave of anti-corruption sentiment put him on a near certain path to the presidency.
AMLO will be replacing incumbent President Enrique Peña Nieto, the center-left pretty boy who proved to be a spectacularly inept and corrupt head of state. This is perhaps best exemplified in a 2014 incident in the city of Iguala where 43 students were killed by a drug cartel, and the federal government did nothing to solve this crime. That massacre had, in fact, been ordered by the town mayor, just to give you an idea of how broken politics in Mexico can be at every level.
Honestly, nothing can really be worse for the country than what they have now, but Obrador does bring some baggage of his own, specifically the Social Encounter Party. The Social Encounter Party, one of the three political groups that make up the pro-AMLO chunk of the new Congress, is actually a right-wing, anti-gay, anti-abortion party. This makes them an odd bedfellow for the President-elect's own left-wing groups and highlights an ideological inconsistency reminiscent of Donald Trump.
AMLO's coalition, named "Together We Will Make History", will be running Mexico at the federal, state, and local levels. While their promise to end corruption brings hope to the Mexican public, their further left economics, specifically opposition to NAFTA, could inflate prices on imports to the United States and throw global trade out of whack as a result.
It remains to be seen whether Mexico will benefit from riding the global wave of populist fervor that defines international politics today, but one can only hope that it brings progress, hope, and dignity back to a country whose leaders have been sorely lacking.
