ASSESSMENTS

What a Populist President Would Mean for Mexico

May 21, 2018 | 08:00 GMT

Andres Manuel Lopez Obrador, the National Regeneration Movement's candidate for Mexico's presidency, addresses the crowd at a campaign event on April 20, 2018.

Andres Manuel Lopez Obrador, the National Regeneration Movement's candidate for Mexico's presidency, addresses the crowd at a campaign event on April 20, 2018. The populist leader's strong performance in the polls ahead of the July 1 vote is making investors in and outside Mexico nervous about what his administration would do.

(HECTOR VIVAS/Getty Images)

Highlights

  • Polls suggest Mexico's populist coalition, led by the National Regeneration Movement, could win the presidency in the July 1 federal elections, along with a majority in the lower house and a near majority in the Senate.
  • If the coalition gains only a lower house majority, it will face heavier pressure from established parties, including the Institutional Revolutionary Party (PRI) and the National Action Party (PAN), to moderate its populist stance.
  • But the PRI and PAN will be weaker in the wake of the vote, assuming the polls bear out, and will have to rely on federal courts to halt potentially controversial legislative measures, such as energy or education reforms.

Less than two months before Mexico's next presidential election, populist candidate Andres Manuel Lopez Obrador leads the polls by 10 points. Lopez Obrador is a leftist leader with a vague policy agenda that raises more questions than it answers. And if he makes it to the presidency, it will be on a wave of anti-establishment feeling among Mexican voters with whom his condemnations of corruption, and of President Enrique Pena Nieto's economic and energy reforms, resonate. For many observers in and outside the country, his election is a worrisome prospect....

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