Lopez Obrador: Mexico’s next president is ‘stubborn’ leftist

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MEXICO CITY, Nov 30, 2018 (BSS/AFP) – “Stubborn” is among the many insults
that have been hurled at Andres Manuel Lopez Obrador, the anti-establishment
leftist who will be sworn in Saturday as Mexico’s next president.

He considers it a compliment.

The man known as “AMLO” kicked off his third, ultimately successful
presidential campaign vowing to use his headstrong personality to fight for
the change that many Mexicans were demanding.

“I’m stubborn. It’s a well-known fact,” he said.

“With that same conviction, I will act as president… stubbornly,
obstinately, persistently, bordering on craziness, to wipe out corruption.”

Those close to him can vouch for that.

“We’re talking about a man whose main quality is his tenacity,” Mexican
writer and historian Paco Ignacio Taibo II, an outspoken supporter, told AFP.

Lopez Obrador, 65, is one of the most divisive figures in Mexican politics:
his critics hate him as fervently as his fans love him.

But his vows to fight for a “radical turn” in Mexico worked in the July 1
elections, in a nation fed up with poverty, corruption scandals and a
horrifically violent drug war.

– Fire and ice –

Lopez Obrador’s fiery attacks on the “mafia of power” successfully tapped
widespread frustration with politics-as-usual in Mexico, where the same two
parties had governed for the past 89 years.

But the two-time presidential runner-up also managed to present a cooler
side this time around, answering criticism with humor and laughing off dire
warnings about how he would wreck Latin America’s second-largest economy.

When enemies accused him of ties to Russia, he slyly turned the insult to
irony, donning a Russian ushanka hat and calling himself “Andres
Manuelovich.”

It turned out his confidence was justified: he won the four-way race with
53 percent of the vote, the biggest margin in Mexico’s modern history.

– Anti-graft poster boy –

Lopez Obrador is vowing to lead his anti-corruption, pro-austerity drive by
example.

He has cut his own salary by 60 percent and forsworn the presidential
residence, scrapped the presidential security detail and vowed to sell the
presidential jet.

“Not even Donald Trump has a plane like that,” he is fond of saying.

He has clashed with Mexico’s business community, with some warning he is a
radical with autocratic tendencies.

Seeking to ease those fears, he has appointed a team of market-friendly
advisers and backpedaled on some of his most controversial proposals.

In fact, it is hard to guess just what his policies will be.

Many Mexicans are unsure what he represents, other than something new. That
proved to be enough.

He has, however, alienated some voters during the transition periods with
decisions like the one to cancel a $13-billion airport for Mexico City that
was already one-third complete.

He based the decision on a controversial referendum that he organized
himself, with no supervision by electoral authorities and myriad
irregularities, such as voters casting multiple ballots.

– Burner of bridges –

Lopez Obrador also has a knack for shooting himself in the foot.

In 2006, he led for most of the race. Then he lost his cool in the home
stretch and insulted the sitting president, Vicente Fox, as a “big-mouth”
(loosely translated).

Many observers have said that may have cost him the race.

Lopez Obrador refused to accept his narrow defeat, proclaiming himself the
“legitimate president” in a faux inauguration and setting up a protest camp
in the heart of Mexico City that plunged the country into weeks of
uncertainty.

He has never hesitated to burn political bridges.

A native of the southern state of Tabasco, he got his start in politics in
the 1970s with the ruling PRI party — now his enemy.

He helped launch a left-wing breakaway, the PRD, in the 1980s.

He made an unsuccessful run for governor of Tabasco in 1994, then leapt to
the national political scene when he was elected Mexico City mayor in 2000.

He left the job to run for president in 2006. After a second unsuccessful
presidential run in 2012, he spurned the PRD to found his own leftist party,
Morena — now the dominant force in Mexican politics.

The widower remarried journalist and writer Beatriz Gutierrez Muller in
2006. He has four sons.