Andrés Manuel López Obrador Wins Mexico’s Presidential Election

AMLO has pledged to fight the corruption, waste, and criminality endemic in Mexican institutions.

Jose Pazos/Notimex/Newscom via ZUMA Press

Fight disinformation: Sign up for the free Mother Jones Daily newsletter and follow the news that matters.

Mexican voters on Sunday elected leftist candidate Andrés Manuel López Obrador as their next presidentsending a strong rebuke to Enrique Peña Nieto, the country’s current president, whose popularity has tanked amid rampant violence and corruption. Exit polls had López Obrador winning a “landslide victory,” according to the New York Times, far ahead of the second place Ricardo Anaya, who was the candidate of an unusual coalition of parties from the left and right. Juan Antonio Meade, the candidate of the currently ruling PRI party, finished third.

López Obrador, widely known as AMLO, will take over on December 1, 2018. The election was the largest in the country’s history, with roughly 3,000 seats up for grabs at the local, state, and national levels.

Some have drawn parallels between AMLO, who is 64 years old, and President Donald Trump. Both campaigned as populists, displaying nationalist tendencies. Obrador, like Trump, has painted himself as an outsider who is singularly positioned to purge the Mexican government of corruption and waste, and vows to fight the criminality endemic in Mexican governmental institutions. And AMLO has advocated a Mexico-first style policy he refers to as mexicanismo. But the two are ideological opposites—AMLO is a leftist who has pledged to re-think foreign corporations’ oil contracts, discuss amnesty for those in the drug trade in pursuit of peace, and better protect Central American migrants as they move north through Mexico toward the US border.

WE'LL BE BLUNT:

We need to start raising significantly more in donations from our online community of readers, especially from those who read Mother Jones regularly but have never decided to pitch in because you figured others always will. We also need long-time and new donors, everyone, to keep showing up for us.

In "It's Not a Crisis. This Is the New Normal," we explain, as matter-of-factly as we can, what exactly our finances look like, how brutal it is to sustain quality journalism right now, what makes Mother Jones different than most of the news out there, and why support from readers is the only thing that keeps us going. Despite the challenges, we're optimistic we can increase the share of online readers who decide to donate—starting with hitting an ambitious $300,000 goal in just three weeks to make sure we can finish our fiscal year break-even in the coming months.

Please learn more about how Mother Jones works and our 47-year history of doing nonprofit journalism that you don't find elsewhere—and help us do it with a donation if you can. We've already cut expenses and hitting our online goal is critical right now.

payment methods

WE'LL BE BLUNT

We need to start raising significantly more in donations from our online community of readers, especially from those who read Mother Jones regularly but have never decided to pitch in because you figured others always will. We also need long-time and new donors, everyone, to keep showing up for us.

In "It's Not a Crisis. This Is the New Normal," we explain, as matter-of-factly as we can, what exactly our finances look like, how brutal it is to sustain quality journalism right now, what makes Mother Jones different than most of the news out there, and why support from readers is the only thing that keeps us going. Despite the challenges, we're optimistic we can increase the share of online readers who decide to donate—starting with hitting an ambitious $300,000 goal in just three weeks to make sure we can finish our fiscal year break-even in the coming months.

Please learn more about how Mother Jones works and our 47-year history of doing nonprofit journalism that you don't find elsewhere—and help us do it with a donation if you can. We've already cut expenses and hitting our online goal is critical right now.

payment methods

We Recommend

Latest

Sign up for our free newsletter

Subscribe to the Mother Jones Daily to have our top stories delivered directly to your inbox.

Get our award-winning magazine

Save big on a full year of investigations, ideas, and insights.

Subscribe

Support our journalism

Help Mother Jones' reporters dig deep with a tax-deductible donation.

Donate