What can the global left learn from Mexico – where far-right politics hasn’t taken off? | Thomas Graham

If you were to summarise the 2024 election year, you might say: grim for incumbents, good for the far right. Yet Mexico bucked both trends. Its governing party, Morena, not only retained the presidency but – along with its partners in the Sigamos Haciendo Historia coalition – gained a two-thirds supermajority in the chamber of deputies, the lower house, while the far right failed to even run a candidate. That a self-described leftwing party could have such success by fixing on Mexico’s chasmic inequality has drawn attention from hopeful progressives worldwide. But Morena’s programme has some not-so-progressive elements too. It is not necessarily one others could – or would want to – copy in its entirety.

Morena first notched a historic result in 2018, when Andrés Manuel López Obrador, an old face of the left who ran for president twice before founding the party, won a record 55% of the vote during the general elections. Mexico’s constitution limits presidents to a single term. But this time, Claudia Sheinbaum, a close ally of López Obrador’s, won 60% of the vote. Her victory was reminiscent of the heyday of Latin America’s “pink tide”, when leftist leaders like Hugo Chávez and Evo Morales were reelected for a second term with more votes than their initial victories.

Composite: Getty Images / Reuters / Guardian Design

Meanwhile, the far right didn’t even get on the ballot. Eduardo Verástegui, an actor turned activist who produced Sound of Freedom, the surprise box office hit about a US federal agent busting a child-trafficking ring in Colombia, sought to bring Trumpian politics to Mexico but failed to collect the signatures required to run as an independent. Rather than developing a Mexican brand of far-right politics, Verástegui tried to transplant a distinctly American flavour that was heavy with God, guns and individualism. It didn’t take root.

Morena’s success in building a leftwing movement stemmed from the party’s focus on socioeconomic justice. López Obrador developed a simple and powerful populist narrative, arguing that the country had been captured by corrupt elites, including the old political parties and their national and transnational business partners. This resonates for people in Mexico, a palpably unequal country in which roughly 27% of income accrues to the richest 1%.

López Obrador promised to change that. His charisma and his long track record in Mexico made him a convincing vehicle for the message, which he hammered home in trips to every corner of the country and daily press conferences known as the mañaneras. In these, he touted his government’s achievements and lambasted its critics, shaping the media agenda. Morena’s message was amplified through state and social media, creating a kind of personality cult around López Obrador.

And he delivered. López Obrador’s government doubled the minimum wage in real terms, while expanding social programmes and cash transfers for pensioners and the young, among others. It clamped down on the practice of outsourcing workers to avoid paying benefits and legislated that union contracts be put to democratic votes. And it focused infrastructure projects on the historically marginalised south, building trains and a new oil refinery. From 2018 to 2022, the percentage of the population living in poverty fell from roughly 42% to 36%.

More from this series

By putting inequality at the centre of his discourse, López Obrador created a committed base of supporters who were willing to overlook the shortcomings of his government. Although he came to power promising to improve corruption, insecurity and impunity, he achieved none of these things. His government had its own corruption scandals, and Mexico’s homicide rate remained high, with about 30,000 murders a year. In some ways, the situation worsened: extortion is now rampant. Despite this, large parts of the population felt increasingly confident in democracy. By 2023, 61% of Mexicans said they had faith in their national government, compared with 29% when he took office.

But progressives elsewhere shouldn’t be too sanguine about the prospect of copying Morena’s model. While doing all the above, López Obrador also made expedient moves to the right. He cut deals with big business and swerved on tax reform. He kept fiscal austerity, meaning boosted social spending was funded with cuts elsewhere. He cracked down on US-bound migrants for political capital in Washington, and he refused to take a position on gay marriage or abortion, presumably to avoid limiting Morena’s appeal. And he embraced Mexico’s military, a popular but opaque institution with a record of human rights abuses, relying on them to deliver his programme. And although López Obrador set up several commissions to investigate historical abuses by the army, he later abandoned them.

Criticisms came from across the political spectrum, but López Obrador brushed them off – and often insinuated they came from actors in hock to the corrupt elites of his narrative. By the end of his government, he had lost support from some feminists, environmentalists and victims of violence, to name a few. Yet his base continued to grow. He left power with approval ratings of about 70%.

Once it became clear that Morena was on the up, politicians of all stripes, including some dubious characters, sought to join. Morena welcomed them, diluting principle with pragmatism. This shortcut to electoral success came at the cost of internal tensions. Still, Morena maintains a membership and grassroots activity that no other party can match. It has 2.3 million registered members, and wants to make that 10 million. Sheinbaum has commanded the party’s activists to get out to every part of the country. (It is an article of faith in the party that López Obrador’s success was born of visiting each of Mexico’s nearly 2,500 municipalities.) All of this no doubt helps ground Morena in local realities – in contrast to the fledgling far right.

The party’s connection to local contexts limits how much progressives outside Mexico can draw from Morena’s example. Mexico is marked by its colonial history, and was under one-party rule for most of the 20th century before it transitioned to democracy in the 1990s. Today, organised crime exerts immense influence through violence and corruption, while Mexico’s economic dependence on the US is extreme. This sharp sense of injustice is a mobilising political sentiment.

It would be tempting to frame Mexico’s political landscape as a story about the left successfully resisting the right. But progressives elsewhere must ask themselves how much they would want to draw from Morena. The focus on socioeconomic justice, the narrative control and the party organisation were tied up with some uglier aspects of populism, and an expedient adoption of rightwing positions. It’s hard to say whether the latter were necessary for Morena’s electoral success. But there is dissent on the Mexican left, where some, having weighed the results against their values, are no longer on board with the party.

• Thomas Graham is a freelance journalist based in Mexico City