{"id":44002,"date":"2018-07-03T03:00:23","date_gmt":"2018-07-03T07:00:23","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/quotulatiousness.ca\/blog\/?p=44002"},"modified":"2018-07-02T11:06:47","modified_gmt":"2018-07-02T15:06:47","slug":"andres-manuel-lopez-obrador-wins-mexican-presidential-election","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/quotulatiousness.ca\/blog\/2018\/07\/03\/andres-manuel-lopez-obrador-wins-mexican-presidential-election\/","title":{"rendered":"Andr\u00e9s Manuel L\u00f3pez Obrador wins Mexican presidential election"},"content":{"rendered":"

Tom Phillips and David Agren<\/a> report from Mexico City for the Guardian<\/em>:<\/p>\n

\n

A baseball-loving leftwing nationalist who has vowed to crack down on corruption, rein in Mexico\u2019s war on drugs and rule for the poor has been elected president of Latin America\u2019s second-largest economy.<\/p>\n

\"\"<\/a>

Andr\u00e9s Manuel L\u00f3pez Obrador, President-Elect of Mexico, who will assume office on 1 December, 2018
Photo via Wikimedia Commons<\/p><\/div>Andr\u00e9s Manuel L\u00f3pez Obrador, a silver-haired 64-year-old who is best known as Amlo and counts Labour leader Jeremy Corbyn among his friends, was elected with at least 53% of the vote, according to a quick count by Mexico\u2019s electoral commission.<\/p>\n

L\u00f3pez Obrador\u2019s closest rival, Ricardo Anaya from the National Action party (PAN), received around 22% while Jos\u00e9 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 around 16%.<\/p>\n

Addressing the media after those results were announced, L\u00f3pez Obrador vowed to repay the trust put in him by millions of Mexicans. \u201cI will govern with rectitude and justice. I will not fail you. I will not disappoint you. I won\u2019t betray the people,\u201d he said.<\/p>\n

Mexico\u2019s president-elect vowed to rule for people of all social classes, all sexual orientations and all points of view. \u201cWe will listen to everyone. We will care for everyone. We will respect everyone,\u201d he said. \u201cBut we will give priority to the most humble and to the forgotten.\u201d<\/p>\n

[…]<\/p>\n

Analysts also expect him to pursue a less aggressive and less militarised approach to Mexico\u2019s 11-old \u2018war on drugs\u2019 which has claimed an estimated 200,000 lives and is widely viewed as a calamity. During the campaign, Amlo has argued \u201cyou cannot fight violence with more violence, you cannot fight fire with fire\u201d and proposed an amnesty designed to help low-level outlaws turn away from a life of crime. <\/p>\n

Eric Olson, a Mexico and Latin America specialist from Washington\u2019s Woodrow Wilson Centre, said he saw Mexico stepping back from regional affairs under its new leader. \u201cAmlo is not an internationalist … we can expect him to play less of an active role in the region on Venezuela, on Nicaragua and other trouble spots.\u201d<\/p>\n

Olson also expected tense moments with US president Donald Trump whose family separation policy Amlo recently denounced as arrogant, racist and inhuman. \u201cBut it\u2019s impossible for the US to walk away from Mexico or for Mexico to walk away from the US. They are joined at the hip and need to work together even if their presidents don\u2019t like each other and don\u2019t get along.\u201d <\/p>\n

Carlos Bravo, a politics expert from Mexico City\u2019s Centre for Economic Research and Teaching, predicted President Amlo would make fighting poverty a flagship policy, just as former Brazilian president Luiz In\u00e1cio Lula da Silva did after his historic 2002 election with projects such as Bolsa Fam\u00edlia and Zero Hunger. Under Amlo he foresaw \u201cmassive investment in social policy\u201d which Mexico\u2019s new president could use to show he was attacking not just poverty and inequality but also the social roots of crime and violence.<\/p>\n

However, Bravo said the \u201cmotley coalition\u201d behind Amlo\u2019s election triumph was so diverse \u2013 featuring former communists, ultra-conservatives and everything in-between \u2013 that trying to guess how he might rule was a fool\u2019s errand. \u201cQuite frankly, right now there is a lot of uncertainty regarding what the L\u00f3pez Obrador government will do.\u201d<\/p><\/blockquote>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

Tom Phillips and David Agren report from Mexico City for the Guardian: A baseball-loving leftwing nationalist who has vowed to crack down on corruption, rein in Mexico\u2019s war on drugs and rule for the poor has been elected president of Latin America\u2019s second-largest economy. Andr\u00e9s Manuel L\u00f3pez Obrador, a silver-haired 64-year-old who is best known […]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":1,"featured_media":35193,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"jetpack_post_was_ever_published":false,"_jetpack_newsletter_access":"","_jetpack_dont_email_post_to_subs":false,"_jetpack_newsletter_tier_id":0,"_jetpack_memberships_contains_paywalled_content":false,"_jetpack_memberships_contains_paid_content":false,"footnotes":""},"categories":[465,84,53],"tags":[188,516],"class_list":["post-44002","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-americas","category-government","category-politics","tag-electionwatch","tag-mexico"],"jetpack_featured_media_url":"https:\/\/quotulatiousness.ca\/blog\/wp-content\/uploads\/2016\/06\/favicon.png","jetpack_shortlink":"https:\/\/wp.me\/p2hpV6-brI","jetpack_sharing_enabled":true,"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/quotulatiousness.ca\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/44002","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/quotulatiousness.ca\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/quotulatiousness.ca\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/quotulatiousness.ca\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/1"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/quotulatiousness.ca\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=44002"}],"version-history":[{"count":4,"href":"https:\/\/quotulatiousness.ca\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/44002\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":44007,"href":"https:\/\/quotulatiousness.ca\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/44002\/revisions\/44007"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/quotulatiousness.ca\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media\/35193"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/quotulatiousness.ca\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=44002"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/quotulatiousness.ca\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=44002"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/quotulatiousness.ca\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=44002"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}