All eyes are on Mexico where, at last, Andres Manuel Lopex Obrado, the Left candidate, has won presidential powers just nearby USA. It is a victory that will interest radical nationalists across the world who would be watching how fast and how far Socialism through electoralism can go. Allende in Chile during the Cold War was cut short by external forces. Evo Morales in Bolivia in the post Cold War didn’t turn up to be such a great success in post neoliberalism. But Mexico is always about sending a completely new message to the world at every moment: successfully checkmating Spain, France and remaining USA’s nieghbour that has undergone all manners of revolutions – agrarian, Socialist and bourgeois – in its history.
No one point might explain why Mexican voters have made a resounding ideological about-turn but no analysts will ignore what a writer has called Mexico’s perpetual battle with freeing the state – either from colonial baggage or from statism. Freeing the state from statism is what began in the early eighties in the turn to neoliberalism following the indebtedness into which Mexico’s heritage of ‘revolutionary nationalism’, contradictions of capitalist industrialisation in an oil dependent state and concern for national greatness landed it. In response, the mostly US educated presidents in the 1980s had to begin to see things from the point of view of neo-liberal globalisation. That involved the choice, perhaps wisely in its circumstance, to negotiate the debts rather than make trouble over it or the turn to seeking safe landing in a mechanism such as the North American Free Trade Area, (NAFTA) in the hope that it could widen livelihood opportunities for Mexicans. That was not the only reason for going the way of NAFTA but the interesting thing was how it happened that Mexico rather than the US or Canada initiated the move into negotiating NAFTA.
By the mid 1990s, the consequences of that turn to neo-liberalism began to be felt both within the industrial sector, middle classes and the commoners. Not only that, the Institutional Revolutionary Party, (PRI), which had been the hegemonic platform for decades began to unravel just as the credit crunch, poverty and criminality were rising.
Obrado had not been able to break – in before now. The claim is that he won the 2006 contest but was rigged out. Now, some media platforms are saying he won so big this time that no one could rig him out. He is assuring he would not fail the people. He is already sending verbal missiles against corruption. He doesn’t care much about Donald Trump, perhaps in a way different from traditional anti-Americanism. How would all these play out? What message is being sent to other developing countries on the question of where to turn in search of political answer to their survival questions: left or right? What is the middle class message from last Sunday’s election in Mexico for a country such as Nigeria where SAP has instigated a rupturous process, including a disabled state?
Below is a UK’s The Guardian‘s video from YouTube in which Obrado speaks to his impending presidency: statements:
