mollyfamwatThe Mexican election of July 1, 2018 saw the most votes ever cast for a presidential candidate in the country’s modern history. The new president of the Mexican lower house will be Andrés Manuel López Obrador, the candidate of the three-party coalition led by the National Regeneration Movement (Morena), which won the elections with 38% of the vote.
Mexico’s new president, Andres Manuel López Obrador, has his first political success after more than a decade of struggling to win over his nation. After leading the polls to win the presidency, the former mayor of Mexico City has won a solid majority in the lower house of the Mexican congress to enable him to govern from the start.
On Sunday, the coalition between the National Regeneration Movement and the Labor Party won the majority in the lower house of the Mexican Congress, giving it the ability to initiate and pass legislation on energy, labor, and education and a slew of other issues. On the campaign trail, López Obrador promised to deliver a number of his economic-focused programs, including free college education for all, new subsidies for the poor and the unemployed, and infrastructure investment.
MEXICO CITY – Chairman Andres Manuel Lopez Obrador together with two small allied parties, won a majority in the country’s lower house in Sunday’s by-elections, but failed to secure the two-thirds majority needed to pursue a more ambitious economic-nationalist agenda. The Presidential Movement for National Rebirth (Morena) and two allied parties won between 265 and 292 seats in the 500-seat lower house of parliament, according to a quick count by the country’s electoral authority. The quick count is a representative sample of votes across the country. According to political analysts, if the President’s party does not win a majority in the lower house of parliament, it will have a much harder time passing a revision of the Mexican constitution. The leftist leader said he would push for a constitutional amendment to increase the government’s control over key sectors of the economy, including the energy sector. Both teams can claim victory at the end of Sunday. The presidential party, founded in 2014, remains Mexico’s biggest political force, with about 35 percent of the vote, compared to about 19 percent for the conservative PAN party and about 18 percent for the former ruling PRI party. Morena also appears to have won at least eight of the 15 gubernatorial districts that were on the ballot Sunday, based on a quick count of the votes. But Mexico’s traditional political parties might also be quieting down, analysts say. The two former ruling parties, PRI and PAN, formed an electoral alliance to prevent Morena from winning a two-thirds majority. This strengthens Congress as a potential check on the president’s growing power. According to initial results, the president’s party lost in Mexico’s second and third largest cities, Monterrey and Guadalajara. He also lost the most constituencies in municipal elections in Mexico City, the country’s capital, which Mr. López Obrador governed from 2000 to 2005. The alliance to stop Lopez Obrador has worked. It was a minor setback for Morena, and it will raise questions about some of AMLO’s ambitions for the next three years, said Carlos Elizondo, a professor of political science at the Technical University of Monterrey in Mexico, calling the president by his usual acronym. Although the president’s party is still the most popular in the country, it lost several percentage points of the vote, which is probably far from what the president and his party had hoped for, said Carlos Bravo Regidor, a political analyst at CIDE University.
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A personal tour of the top scoops and stories that appear daily in the Wall Street Journal. This will affect the core of the president’s political movement, he said. This will weaken the president a bit. The danger, Mr. Bravo Regidor added, is that the president is radicalizing. It’s always dangerous, because if he doesn’t agree to work with the opposition parties to get his agenda through, I see the possibility that he will use other means to get his agenda through, such as the judicial system. These results will force López Obrador to appeal to the small Green Party to pass legislation and the annual budget. The party has no clear ideology and is usually linked to the ruling party in exchange for patronage and political offices, political analysts said. 
Online for the midterm elections in Mexico City.
Photo: Alejandro Segarra/Bloomberg News Mexicans have become highly polarized under the influence of their populist leader. He says he is fighting for the transformation of the country on behalf of the poor against a corrupt traditional political class that has introduced free market reforms over the past three decades and enriched itself at the expense of ordinary Mexicans. Fernando Villanueva, a 42-year-old accountant from Mexico City, said Sunday was an obvious choice for him. There are only two options: the project of the fourth transformation and the corruption of neoliberalism, Villanueva said. But not far behind is Edmundo Trigos, a 72-year-old systems consultant. Trigos said he was concerned that López Obrador was concentrating too much power in his hands. This election is crucial for Mexico – not just for Mexico, but for Latin America, he said. I think it is a mistake to concentrate power with one group; checks and balances are needed. In his first three years in power, the 67-year-old head of state has achieved some significant political successes. He introduced an austerity program that cut salaries of senior officials, closed some departments and used the savings to increase social spending, including doubling the cash pension for the elderly. It has repeatedly raised the minimum wage significantly. 
Voting in Mexico City in an election in which the entire lower house of Congress was at stake.
Photo: Alejandro Segarra/Bloomberg News But it wasn’t a walk in the park. Some of his early measures, such as canceling Mexico City’s partially built new airport, discouraged business investment and the economy sank into recession even before the pandemic hit Mexico particularly hard. Mexico has more deaths per capita than all but a handful of other countries. The country’s economy fell 8.5% last year, partly because the president implemented the fewest stimulus programs of any emerging market. In Mexico it represents 1% of the gross domestic product, in Brazil 8.3%. Despite the weak economy and the pandemic, Mr. Lopez Obrador’s approval rating remains high, at about 65 percent, and many Mexicans say they trust him. It’s not easy, there are many interests against him. We have to be realistic, said Villanueva, an accountant, who cited the resilience of the Mexican peso as a positive factor. The president’s critics see him as a potential autocrat. Lopez Obrador wants a recall referendum in 2022 so Mexicans can decide whether he should stay in power until the end of his term, a tool used by Latin American leaders to ensure authoritarian rule. His party recently extended the term of the president of the Supreme Court, who is close to Mr. Lopez Obrador, which could set a precedent for extending the term of the president himself. According to the constitution, Mexican presidents cannot be re-elected after a six-year term. The president has vowed to step down at the end of his term.
Political upheavals in Latin America
Read other documents selected by the editors -Anthony Harrup in Mexico City contributed to this article. Email Juan Montes at [email protected] and David Lukhnov at [email protected]. Copyright ©2020 Dow Jones & Company, Inc. All rights reserved. 87990cbe856818d5eddac44c7b1cdeb8On Sunday afternoon in Mexico City, Andrés Manuel López Obrador’s coalition won a majority in Congress when the lower house voted to elect him as the country’s next president. López Obrador, the former mayor of Mexico City, won more than five million votes in the July 1 presidential election. And the coalition he formed, Morena, won more than 57 percent of the lower house vote.. Read more about amlo approval rating and let us know what you think.
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