While the outcome of Mexico’s presidential election on 2 June came as little surprise, the scale of it was startling.footnote¹ Claudia Sheinbaum, the former governor of Mexico City, had been the frontrunner even before she was formally named the candidate of a coalition between the ruling National Regeneration Movement (Movimiento de Regeneración Nacional, Morena), the Green Party (Partido Verde Ecologista de México, pvem) and the Worker’s Party (Partido del Trabajo, pt). But while most polls in the lead-up to the vote projected her winning by a solid margin, there was little hint of the landslide to come. Sheinbaum scored 60 per cent, garnering just under 36 million votes, while her nearest rival, Xóchitl Gálvez, candidate of a three-party coalition between the National Action Party (Partido Acción Nacional, pan), the Institutional Revolutionary Party (Partido Revolucionario Institucional, pri), and the Party of the Democratic Revolution (Partido de la Revolución Democrática, prd), scored 27 per cent; Jorge Álvarez Máynez of the Citizens’ Movement (Movimiento Ciudadano, mc) came a distant third with 10 per cent.

Sheinbaum’s victory is even more impressive when broken down geographically and sociologically. Mexico is a tremendously diverse country, with marked demographic, socio-economic and cultural differences between regions. Since the advent of competitive elections in the 1990s, these have tended to produce a variegated political map. But Sheinbaum not only won all of Mexico’s 32 states except one (tiny Aguascalientes); she did so by more than 20 per cent in 25 cases, and by more than 40 per cent in 14.footnote² She performed especially well in the country’s poorer south, pulling in more than 70 per cent of the vote in Chiapas, Guerrero, Oaxaca, Tabasco and Quintana Roo. But she also won Guanajuato and Jalisco, the heartland of Mexican conservatism, as well as Mexico State, long a crucial base for the pri, and Nuevo León, bastion of the country’s northern business elites. Exit polls suggest Sheinbaum’s support also had a striking sociological breadth: she seems to have won a clear majority in every age cohort and of almost every level of education, and had a crushing 50-point lead among those who identified as ‘lower class’. Even among the ‘middle class’, whom the opposition had clearly expected to rally to its side, Sheinbaum was ahead by 30 points.footnote³

More than a victory, this was a political show of force. Yet it was not entirely unprecedented: in 2018, Sheinbaum’s predecessor, Andrés Manuel López Obrador—universally known by the initials amlo—won in similarly crushing fashion, by 53 per cent to his nearest rival’s 22, and he likewise swept the map (the only state he didn’t win was Guanajuato). At the time, the 2018 result was seen as a political earthquake, and it sent establishment pundits into a tailspin. Sheinbaum’s victory confirms that the systemic shock López Obrador delivered six years ago was no fluke, but rather marked the start of a new period in Mexico’s political history. It also poses once more an analytical challenge most commentary in the Anglosphere has been ill equipped to meet: how to explain the enduring popularity of amlo himself and the sustained success of Morena as a national project for power?

The interpretative task is scarcely made easier by the polarization of views on López Obrador and the pervasive tendency for discussions to focus on his persona. According to his critics—massively over-represented both in the Mexican media and Anglo outlets—amlo has taken the country to the brink of disaster, undermining its institutions, coarsening political discourse and spreading misinformation. For his supporters—far less visible in the Mexican media, and almost totally ignored outside it—he has mounted a long-overdue challenge to the privileges of a small elite, and has improved living standards for the majority of the population while beginning to tackle the scourge of corruption. To judge by most coverage in Mexico and outside it, López Obrador leaves office under a cloud of unprecedented discontent. Yet he has consistently had the highest approval rating of any Mexican president since the return of competitive elections, and when those who voted for his successor were asked their reasons for doing so, huge majorities cited a desire to maintain his policies.footnote⁴

If Sheinbaum’s election represents a validation of amlo’s legacy, understanding what comes next for Mexico partly depends on what we take that legacy to be. López Obrador came to power in 2018 promising a ‘Fourth Transformation’, a period of national renewal comparable to three historic upheavals that remade the country: the struggle for independence from Spain in 1810–21; the mid-nineteenth-century liberal reforms under Benito Juárez; and the Mexican Revolution of 1910–20. Both López Obrador’s supporters and his critics refer to this ambitious project as ‘the 4T’—the difference lying in the tone with which they do so. Nothing quite so grandiose has taken place during his sexenio, but there can be little doubt that Mexico’s political topography has shifted dramatically, nor that he and Morena have played an active role in that process. This makes it especially important to get a clearer picture of the nature of amlo’s and Morena’s project, as well as of his administration’s actual record, in order to then assess the likely trajectories open to his successor.

amlo’s path to power was long and contentious, but the ideas and commitments that came to underpin his ‘4T’ have been remarkably consistent. He was born in the coastal state of Tabasco in 1953, to parents who had come from humble backgrounds to become petty traders. He studied political science at the Universidad Nacional Autónoma de México in the capital, strongly influenced by the radical ferment of the early 1970s, and like many of his peers stunned by the downfall of Allende in 1973.footnote⁵ He returned to Tabasco in 1976, entering politics through the national senate campaign of the poet Carlos Pellicer, who ran as an external candidate under the pri’s flag. Rather than cruise to a rigged victory in the customary pri manner, Pellicer mounted a serious populist campaign to try to actually win the vote—an on-the-ground experience from which amlo clearly absorbed much.footnote⁶ A year later López Obrador was appointed to run Tabasco’s branch of the Instituto Nacional Indigenista, the Mexican government body tasked with ‘incorporating’ indigenous people into the national economy and the mestizo mainstream. Over the next few years he oversaw various ini programs designed to address the poverty and marginalization of Tabasco’s Chontal Maya peoples—improvements to agricultural productivity, construction of housing and schools, establishment of a Chontal-language radio station. The success of these ventures drew the attention of the state-level pri leadership, but in 1983 López Obrador turned down an administrative role in the party, already pessimistic about the possibilities for its democratization from within.footnote⁷ In the late 1970s and early 1980s, he also taught sociology at Tabasco’s state university, and in 1987 he completed his degree at unam with a thesis on ‘The Process of Formation of the National State in Mexico, 1821–67’. The period in question spans two of the three precedents he would draw on for the 4T; his choice of topic also signalled a desire to seek additional roots for a national-popular politics, at a moment when the pri’s self-serving mythology of the Mexican Revolution was reaching the point of exhaustion.

In November 1988, López Obrador gave an interview to the magazine ¡Por Esto! in which he summed up his political philosophy: ‘I am a juarista politically and a cardenista economically and socially.’footnote⁸ Benito Juárez, president from 1858–72, battled against entrenched conservative interests, especially the Catholic Church, as well as leading the resistance to France’s imposition of Maximilian Habsburg as Emperor of Mexico. Lázaro Cárdenas, president from 1934–40, carried out a sweeping agrarian reform, redistributing 50 million hectares of land, and revived the progressive impulses of the Mexican Revolution. López Obrador was among those who supported the presidential candidacy of Lázaro’s son, Cuauhtémoc Cárdenas. In 1988, the latter was put forward by the National Democratic Front (Frente Democrático Nacional, fdn), which had emerged out of a confluence of civil society groups, the organized left, and dissident pri members opposed to the ruling party’s adoption of neoliberal policies. But the pri’s nominee, Carlos Salinas, won the presidency through a particularly brazen fraud, and then proceeded to accelerate the neoliberal programme of free-market reforms and privatizations, leading the country into nafta at the end of his term, and bequeathing his successor the peso crisis of 1994 and a deep recession.footnote⁹ In the wake of the 1988 fraud, meanwhile, Cárdenas formed the social-democratic prd, and in 1997 he won the governorship of Mexico City, creating a platform for challenging the pri at the national level.