LAURA OLSEN: Virtually every poll is giving him the election at this point. When the ruling parties, the Institutional Revolutionary Party (PRI) split, and in 1988, very soon after he was among those who broke off and created the left-wing Party of the Democratic Revolution, which is known by its initials, PRD, and that party began to to create a center-left alternative within Mexico City. But after a number of years, the PRD became very closely aligned with the powers that be, basically with the PRI and the PAN (conservative National Action Party). They all got together at the beginning of the (Enrique) Peña Nieto presidency, who’s the current president, and Peña Nieto formed something called a Pact for Mexico that accepted a number of structural reforms that were pushed through Congress and that basically deepened the neoliberal economic model that’s been imposed since the early 1980s.
So he has been building an alternative. And then when the National Regeneration movement split off from the PRD, he was the natural leader. He was the mayor of Mexico City and was generally considered to have initiated, a number of positive changes. He’s committed to some forms of redistribution of wealth, especially decreasing inequality by reducing corruption and the privileges that the super-rich currently enjoy, as well as creating programs such as providing pensions to the elderly and more economic stimulation programs in the countryside where poverty has been so high that’s its created since the North American Free Trade Agreement, in particular, this surge of migrants to the United States; and creating also different forms of support for other vulnerable sectors. So, we have a candidate who could be considered close to social Democrats, he doesn’t identify as a socialist like Bernie Sanders, but he believes in a stronger role, stated in the redistribution of wealth, and his main line that he repeats almost in response to any question is eliminating the corruption. And this really resonates.
BETWEEN THE LINES: I did want to ask you, what kind of role has Mexican nationalism played in this election campaign given the many, many attacks that Donald Trump here in the United States has directed at Mexico and Mexicans. Tell us about what the atmosphere is around Trump or does he have much to do with this election at all?
LAURA CARLSEN: The biggest part of it is that with Donald Trump is insulting Mexico all the time, there’s one thing that Mexicans unite around and that’s repudiation of Donald trump and his influence. Lopez Obrador has been very careful about this. He’s not coming out saying, “I’m going to immediately, you know, obviously not cut off relationships with the United States. He said that will stay in NAFTA, but we’re going to renegotiate on our terms.” And he said that there has to be less economic dependency because this political dependency is largely seen as a result of the fact that Mexico has so much economic dependency on the United States with some 80 percent of its trade with a single country, the United States. So he’s saying that we’re going to diversify trade, we’re going to stimulate the internal market rather than being exclusively export-oriented according to this neoliberal model. So we’ve talking about making a number of changes, but he’s not coming out with the radical ideas that could really trigger a stronger reaction in Washington against his presidency. We’re not talking about the firebrand and wild-eyed radical that sometimes the U.S. press likes to portray when it warns about a Lopez presidency. We’re talking about someone who is a lifelong politician and fairly moderate within what could be called the center left, you know, range of the spectrum.
