The Mexican political system was shaken on 1 July 2018, when Andrés Manuel López Obrador (AMLO) and his new party MORENA achieved a resounding electoral victory, winning 53% of the votes in a four-way race – a thirty-point lead over his closest contender. This was by far the widest margin since the country’s ‘transition to democracy’ at the turn of the millennium. The parties that had dominated the political field throughout the neoliberal period were suddenly reduced to rubble. Today, the president’s approval ratings remain in the sixties, despite a relentlessly hostile press, a global pandemic, its accompanying economic crisis and inflationary pressures. Longstanding rivalries between the opposition parties have been shelved, with the PRI, PAN and PRD forced to come together or forfeit any possibility of succeeding at the ballot box.

The idiosyncrasies of AMLO’s left-populist presidency have pitted him not only against the neoliberal right, but also against the ‘progressive’ cosmopolitan intelligentsia and neozapatista-adjacent autonomists. These groups have variously accused him of ‘turning the country into Venezuela’, peddling ‘conservativism’ and acting as a ‘henchman of capital’. Yet as his six-year term reaches its final lap, a closer look at AMLO’s record reveals a much more complex picture. His overarching project has been to move away from neoliberalism towards a model of nationalist-developmentalist capitalism. To what extent has he succeeded, and what can the...

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