Claudia Sheinbaum’s Election in Mexico Shows How the Left Can Win

Predictably, right-wing pundits have responded to the election with classist conclusions that attribute the result to the government’s direct cash-transfer programs. According to Hector Águilar Camín, voters choose Morena in order to keep their social programs; Camin also called Morena voters “low intensity citizens.” Denise Dresser was ridiculed after she expressed disappointment that voters did not heed her warnings about Morena’s alleged threat to the country’s democracy and lamented that they had “once again placed chains upon themselves after we had taken them off.” Political commentator Carolina Hernández argued on the right-wing Latinus outlet during their election post-mortem that voters are too busy thinking about things other than political checks and balances when they go out to “buy tortillas.”

This sort of contempt for the intelligence of Mexicans does help explain why the opposition’s electoral strategy failed so spectacularly. They were convinced that by playing up the humble origins of their so-called charismatic candidate, right-wing Senator Xóchitl Gálvez, they would be able to win over the working class. Despite having mostly opposed AMLO’s social programs, they found themselves forced to defend them, lest voters punish them if they perceived them as threatening the continuity of these programs.

Instead, they centered their messaging on the alleged dictatorial ambitions of Morena. What they failed to realize is that they were asking the citizenry to defend an abstract idea that consistently failed to deliver on the most basic of its promises. The election of Vicente Fox in the year 2000 and the subsequent end of the Institutional Revolutionary Party’s 71-year rule ultimately translated into few material improvements for Mexico’s working class and poor.

During Mexico’s democratic transition, neoliberalism was the order of the day. Despite parties’ alternating in power, little fundamentally changed. The ideological blinders of the architects and beneficiaries of the neoliberal democratic transition made it impossible for them to understand the political moment that Mexico experienced with AMLO’s election in 2018. Denied the access to power that they were accustomed to, these pundits and intellectuals instead grew resentful. They argued that AMLO had “undermined” Mexican democracy by his “populist” style of governance and that his successor aimed to continue this process.

The election result showed that their arguments, dutifully taken up by the opposition, were soundly rejected by the country. Mindful of the real and life-changing material improvements brought about by AMLO, voters consciously and intentionally acted on López Obrador’s call for a supermajority, delivering a powerful mandate to Sheinbaum to not only consolidate the “Fourth Transformation” of Mexico but to deepen it.

President López Obrador, President-elect Sheinbaum, and Morena’s leadership in Congress have already announced that a series of wide-ranging reforms that the president says are aimed at restoring the “public, social and humanistic character” of the 1917 Constitution will be discussed this coming September, before the official end of AMLO’s term. Morena has long sought changes in the electoral authority and a reform of the federal judiciary that the president has described as “rotten,” conservative strongholds of Mexico’s ancien régime, are practically inevitable.

Claudia Sheinbaum has a nearly wide-open field in front of her; the limits to her ability to implement what she calls the “second floor” of the transformation are not political. The greatest threats to Sheinbaum’s agenda will likely come from abroad. Financial markets have predictably reacted negatively to her win and Morena’s supermajority.

History has shown that after taking a drubbing at the ballot box, right-wing forces in Latin America typically run into the arms of US imperialism. The Mexican opposition will predictably cry to Washington that Mexico is descending into a dictatorship and will call for foreign intervention. The opposition leadership is already trying to sow doubt over the legitimacy of the election, which might politically weaken Sheinbaum’s administration within influential circles in the United States, including among some Republicans who are seriously considering invading Mexico in the event of a Trump victory.

The Sheinbaum government will defend Mexican sovereignty, just as AMLO did before her. But the struggle to defend a pro-worker government in Mexico will also fall in part to US-based anti-imperialist activists.

The Mexican election has shown that when you put the interests of workers first, they will reward you with a strengthened mandate. With US elections around the corner, progressive and leftist forces would do well to study the Mexican experience.