Is Mexico’s President a Threat to Its Democracy?

During a recent visit to a coal-fired power plant run by Mexico’s state electricity utility, President Andrés Manuel López Obrador recalled with nostalgia that only a few decades ago, the state produced all of the country’s electricity. Now, he lamented, it generated only half, thanks to free-market policies over the past three decades that had hurt ordinary Mexicans. “In that period they tried to destroy Pemex and the Federal Electricity Commission with reforms to take market share away from them to give it to private companies, especially foreign ones,” he said, referring to Mexico’s former state oil and electricity monopolies.

The silver-haired populist is trying to reverse course. It is part of what critics see as a drive to recreate the Mexico of his youth in the 1960s and 1970s, when the country was a one-party state with an all-powerful president, a compliant congress and courts, and an economy powered by state-run firms, especially in energy. It was a time before the country embraced globalization in the mid-1980s and democracy in the late 1990s.

“It’s the return of the Tlatoani,” says political analyst Denise Dresser, referring to ancient Aztec kings that began a long tradition in Mexico of powerful rulers, including Spanish viceroys and Mexican presidents so dominant that a 1970s joke had the president asking what time it was only to be told “whatever time you say it is, Mr. President.”

What is different about the 67-year-old Mr. López Obrador—widely known by his initials, AMLO—is how he has managed to dominate the political and economic life of this country of 126 million not by defying its democratic system but by exploiting it. Elected by a landslide in 2018, he is by far the most authentically popular politician this country has seen in a generation, boasting 60% approval ratings despite a weak economy and a pandemic that hit Mexico particularly hard.

Now, many in business and growing numbers of middle-class Mexicans fear that he will use that power to subvert the very democracy that elevated him. Even presidents from Mexico’s former ruling Institutional Revolutionary Party (PRI)—described by the Peruvian novelist Mario Vargas Llosa as the “perfect dictatorship”—dutifully obeyed the Mexican constitution by retiring after a single six-year term. Mr. López Obrador, by contrast, is hollowing out a number of the institutions that limit presidential power, and many worry that he will try to stay in office beyond 2024, or at least hold sway over a handpicked successor.