Transcript
A (0:00)
Dan I'm Dan Kurtz Phelan, and this is the Foreign affairs interview.
B (0:05)
The central point of focus and of attention should be not only why she won, and there are a number of reasons, but the consequences of her victory.
A (0:20)
Earlier this month, Claudia Sheinbaum won a sweeping victory in Mexico's presidential election. Although a lot of the coverage framed the results as a win for women and progressive politics, the story is far more complicated. Mexico's democracy is in trouble, warns Denise Dresser, a political analyst in Mexico. For years, Dresser has watched Chaimbaum's party and its previous leader, Andres Manuel Lopez Obrador, govern through polarization and the erosion of democratic institutions, even as the country struggles with violence, corruption and persistent inequality. There is a chance Cheimbaum charts a different course. But if not, Dresser worries Mexico could face an autocratic future. Denise Dresser, thank you so much for joining me today and for the series of really trenchant pieces you've done on Mexico and the state of Mexican democracy for foreign affairs over the last several years.
B (1:18)
Thank you for the invitation.
A (1:20)
We are having this conversation just over a week after Mexico's presidential election. Claudia Scheinbaum was expected to win, given that she is the successor to the quite popular incumbent, Andres Manuel Lopez Obrador, known as amlo, and she is in his party, Morena. But I think most observers seem to be surprised by just how commandingly she won with more than 30 point lead over her next strongest challenger. Her party won a super majority in the lower house of Congress and nearly did in the Senate. So it really is quite a staggering victory. In as you watch the campaign and the results of the election, what to your mind accounts for just the extent of that victory that she won?
B (2:00)
Well, first of all, I was not shocked by her victory. Serious analysts understood that it was very hard for the opposition to win in an environment where the playing field was no longer level, where the opposition carried the stigma of past governance and was not viewed as a truly competitive, attractive alternative. I was shocked by the magnitude of her victory. It was a landslide that we have not witnessed since Mexico transitioned to electoral democracy in the year 2000. She won with 35 million votes, over 30% above the opposition coalition. So this gives her a mandate and it gives her a level of power that even Andres Manuel Lopez Obrador, her predecessor, did not have. And I think that much of the American media, its take has been wrong because so much of the coverage has centered on the fact that she's a woman, the fact that she's Jewish, the central of point of focus and of attention should be not only why she won, and there are a number of reasons, but the consequences of her victory. Why she won, I think is a combination of several factors, which is the governments of the past, the divided and discredited opposition that never did a mea culpa and never assumed the mistakes that the pastor offered to correct them. But I think the reasons behind her victory are more complex. One has to do with a very popular president. I always argued over the past six years that the so called fourth transformation wasn't just a government. It was also a narrative, a very seductive narrative, A narrative that is popular throughout the world and that accompanies many examples of backsliding and in other places. Hungary, Poland, until recently, India, El Salvador, Nicaragua is the most extreme cases. But it's the narrative of the people versus the elites, the people versus the bested interests, the people versus the oligarchy, the people versus the traditional establishment parties, the people against liberal democracy that never did anything for them. And one of the changes that we did see under Lopez Obrador's government was his government enacted a series of social programs that are based largely on cash disbursements, pension programs for the elderly, scholarships for the young, and a series of supportive programs for people in the rural countryside. And what was noticeable about these programs is the cash aspect of them, which is somewhat contradictory insofar as the narrative of Lopez Obrador being a leftist, because this is another thing that I think most mainstream media in the United States and elsewhere got wrong. I don't believe that Lopez Obrador is a leftist. In many ways, his program has been an extension or a strengthening of neoliberal approaches to social policy. And cash transfers are the most clear example of this. Cash transfers are something that, for example, the Republican Party would dream of having while dismantling the social safety nets of the state, which is basically what Lopez Obrador did. And for many of Mexico's poor, and we're talking about what has been a permanent subclass of over 50 million million people suddenly becoming important in the narrative, suddenly feeling represented by a president who talked to them, who looked like them, who ate like them, who gave them dignity, and who constructed identity politics in Mexico in a way that we'd never seen them in the past, plus cash disbursements that filled up a void that a very inefficient state had not failed in the past. If institutions never worked for you under democracy, and suddenly you got a pension for your elderly parent, and that pension had distributive effects throughout the whole family, then, of course, why not vote for the party that for the first time seemed to be caring about you and paying attention to, to you?
