On April 7, Mexico's two leading presidential candidates held the first of three televised debates. The candidates are Claudia Sheinbaum of current President Manuel Andrés López Obrador's ruling MORENA party (known as AMLO) and Berta Xositl Gálvez of the Mexican Electoral Alliance Strength and Heart. Mr. The alliance is made up of three of Mexico's oldest political parties: the Institutional Revolutionary Party (PRI), which ruled Mexico for 70 years until 2000, the right-wing National Action Party (PAN), and the Democratic Revolutionary Party, which is nominally a social democratic party. has been done. (PRD), AMLO withdrew in his 2012 and founded MORENA.
Mr. Galvez was widely seen as a poor performer, fumbling both in articulating political and social proposals and in delivering sharp, if not shrill, attacks on Sheinbaum. After the debate, Galvez admitted that he had performed poorly, blaming it on not trying to “be himself.”
Sheinbaum is a scientist with a Ph.D. He is a PhD in Energy Engineering and previously served as Secretary of the Environment in Mexico City under AMLO. She was in a vulnerable position because she did not address the serious subway collapse that occurred while she was head of Mexico City's government and Mexico City's worsening crisis of water shortages and land sinking. Gálvez could not attack on these fronts.
Opinion polls after the debate showed that Mr. Galvez received no votes, with Mr. Galvez receiving 34% to 36% of the vote and Mr. Sheinbaum 58% to 60%, or about a 24% difference from the front-runner. ing. Two more debates are scheduled for April 28 and May 19, but at this point it appears that Mr. Sheinbaum's lead in the June 2 election is irreversible.
The third candidate who participated in the debate, Jorge Álvarez Maínez of the Civic Movement Party, which promotes the so-called “social market economy”, received 5-6% support in post-debate opinion polls, a few points behind him. obtained.
On the contrary, since AMLO's landslide victory in 2018, the PAN and PRI have lost even more support, and his former party, the PRD, is nearly politically moribund.
AMLO's tepid social programs (modest cash transfers and wage and pension increases amounting to 130 million) remained popular. So Mr. Galvez, a liberal and tech-minded man, insists on preserving AMLO's social programs. Mr. Sheinbaum claims with more credence that he will continue with AMLO as his hand-picked successor.
Some members of the American right-wing, e.g. wall street journal For example, editorial board members have prioritized Mexico's state oil company Pemex over American oil companies, sometimes supported Venezuela and Nicaragua with rhetoric, and refused to attend the United Nations Summit of the Americas. There is a tendency to reflexively cast blame on AMLO. Los Angeles state in 2022. But the more enlightened layers of the American oligarchy and its civil servants value AMLO's cooperation in many ways.
A prime example of this is AMLO's bid to confront Biden last year over control of a wave of mass immigration of poor people from Latin America and the Caribbean.
The US similarly values what AMLO calls “Republican austerity,” with large-scale spending largely focused on a handful of pet projects such as the “Maya Train” in southern Mexico and Pemex's Dos Bocas refinery. and is intended only for the military. . Similarly, Mexico's central bank, which maintains interest rates at high levels, is viewed favorably by its strict management.
Most importantly for American imperialism, AMLO fostered an environment favorable to American investment in the United States. The U.S. government is increasingly looking to Mexico as a junior partner in its economic war against China and as a platform for nearshore production that was previously based in China.
As an example, Elon Musk's Tesla is investing billions of dollars in a factory near the industrial center of Monterrey in northeastern Mexico.
AMLO did nothing to step on the toes of the Mexican oligarchy or its 14 billionaires. Some of them continue to significantly avoid tax obligations. He has a very friendly relationship with Callos Slim Helu, the 11th richest person in the world and Latin America's richest man with a net worth of $105 billion, about 7 percent of Mexico's GDP. It is in.
Mr. Sheinbaum, AMLO's handpicked successor, has no intention of changing course. She has vowed not to raise or impose new taxes on the wealthy and corporate profits, which means social programs will be the first victims of shocks from a disrupted global economy and demands for increased military spending. Only. A coalition of NGOs led by Oxfam Mexico estimates that just maintaining existing access to health care, education, care for the elderly and young children, and green energy programs will require spending increases equivalent to 5.5 percent of GDP. are doing.
AMLO's real role is to suppress Mexico's class struggle and keep wages low.
Nevertheless, the pseudo-leftists will praise AMLO. For example, the US-based Democratic Socialists of America recently held an online conference and praised him to the sky.
DSA and organizations like it are middle-class organizations, and it is hard to imagine that the Mexican working class is engaged in a power struggle. But only a world socialist revolution will end the widespread suffering of the Mexican masses.
