- Thousands gather early for Sheinbaum’s presidential campaign rally
- Morena party and AMLO gain significant political momentum
- AMLO’s policies reduce poverty and overhaul Mexico’s political landscape
The promotional flyers for Claudia Sheinbaum’s presidential campaign indicated that the kickoff rally would begin at four in the afternoon. However, by 2:00 pm, the Zocalo, the principal square in this capital city, was already crowded with thousands of supporters vying for a small margin of elbow room and spilling into the adjacent streets.
The crowd’s density increased as one approached the Zocalo, rendering movement increasingly difficult. Eventually, just before reaching the square, the crowd’s motion decelerated and essentially ceased. As individuals futilely attempted to pass one another with their bodies pressed close together, a palpable unease descended upon the crowd, and some began to exhibit signs of panic. A strident voice then emanated, pleading for silence.
Here, we are all Morenistas!” “Let us attend to one another!” yelled the voice, employing a colloquial expression to refer to members of the leftist political party Morena, which the departing president of Mexico established, Andres Manuel Lopez Obrador.
The congestion was quickly resolved, and the Morenistas continued their march, with the majority locating a comparatively secure area of the Zocalo from which to support Sheinbaum, the protégé of Lopez Obrador and the current governor of Mexico City. According to Mexico City officials, the March 1 inaugural rally was attended by an estimated 350,000 individuals, which is roughly the population of Cleveland, Ohio.
With a mere ten years since its establishment, Morena, which is an acronym for the National Regeneration Movement and a biblical reference to the indigenous version of the Virgin Mary in Mexico known as La Morena (which translates to “brown one”), is reportedly bringing together the most populous Spanish-speaking nation on earth, modernising the state, and resetting the dynamic between the governed and their government.
Since his near-two-to-one victory over his closest opponent in 2018, Lopez Obrador, 70, has amassed an almost cult-like following and emerged as a pivotal figure in this political movement. Following their election on the platform of a “put the poor first” campaign promise, Morena and Lopez Obrador, more commonly referred to as AMLO, have implemented a sequence of Keynesian policies to augment the purchasing power of consumers. These reforms resemble the New Deal implemented by Franklin Delano Roosevelt.
During his six years in office, AMLO has nearly doubled the national minimum wage from 123 Mexican pesos (approximately $7) to 249 pesos ($14). The wage increase and a number of labour laws have enabled trade unions to gain authority and increase per capita wages to an all-time high.
Under AMLO’s direction, the government has consistently increased the number of families receiving cash stipends to 14 million, increased the average payment by more than half when adjusted for inflation, and established a top-rated pension plan for retirees. Nearly every household receives government assistance in the traditionally poorest states of Mexico—Oaxaca, Chiapas, and Guerrero. Between 2018 and 2022, financial assistance programmes lifted 5.1 million people out of poverty.
The national poverty rate has been reduced to 36.3 per cent, the lowest in a generation, and the income gap between the nation’s most affluent and poorest has shrunk by a factor of 15 due to checks from the public treasury, according to Mexico’s National Council for the Evaluation of Social Development Policy, a federal agency.
In addition, Morena has allocated $2.8 billion in public funds towards developing a 188-mile railway corridor connecting the Pacific Ocean and the Gulf of Mexico. This endeavour aims to establish a prominent global trade centre on par with the Panama Canal. Additionally, construction is underway on the Mayan Train, which is anticipated to carry three million passengers per year along a 1,555-kilometer (966-mile) stretch of the Yucatan Peninsula once completed.
After the Mexican revolution, the country’s independence from Spain, and the reform government of Mexico’s sole Indigenous president, Benito Pablo Juarez Garcia, “Morenistas” (Morena party supporters) have dubbed the Lopez Obrador administration “Mexico’s “Fourth Transformation” due to its radical reversal of the traditional, free-market policies of the Institutional Revolutionary Party, or PRI, which ruled Mexico for 71 consecutive years until 2000, and another A January poll found that nearly seven in ten respondents were satisfied with AMLO’s job performance, a slight decrease from the eight in ten who were satisfied during his first few months in office.
Lopez Obrador cannot run for re-election in Mexico per the constitution. However, Sheinbaum is so far ahead of her closest rival in the polls that the only suspense surrounding the June 2 presidential election is whether or not Morena will secure the two-thirds congressional majority required to amend the constitution.
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“According to the results of the polls, the public is overwhelmingly in favour,” said Miguel Chavez Azcue, who travelled 160 kilometres (83 miles) from his residence in Puebla to attend the March 1 Morena rally. “The Mexican people have undergone a revolution of consciousness; they are well-informed, as this densely packed square demonstrates.”
Unsurprisingly, the populist president’s adherents perceive him more positively than the nation’s elite. AMLO faces censure within Mexico’s affluent enclaves due to his endorsement of “la classe alta” (the upper class) for inexpensive, ill-fitting suits, “soft-on-crime” police reforms, an authoritarian approach, and a default stance that attributes nearly everything to the country’s elites.
