Riding a wave of voter anger against rigged, cheating elites, crime and institutional corruption (sound familiar?), former Mexico City Mayor Andres Manuel Lopez Obrador upended Mexico’s political order with a landslide election win Sunday.
Never mind the polite tweets across the Rio Grande: hopes of keeping alive a vital economic and political alliance with our southern neighbor, above all the North American Free Trade Agreement, are about to get crushed between two fierce, feisty nationalists.
The real winner? President Trump, who just as surely as he’d rallied his way to election calling Mexicans “rapists” and “murderers,” inflamed an overwhelming revolt by Mexicans against their encrusted, corrupted establishment.
He won’t get Mexico to pay for that damn wall, but Trump did just get exactly what he wanted — an adversary as eager as he is to put his nation above all others.
While all three candidates ran against the devil to the north, Lopez Obrador outdid them all in his fury, even as he also campaigned against the rot within Mexico. For starters, he vows to combat government corruption endemic from the near-75 years that the outgoing Institutional Revolutionary Party, or PRI, dominated federal politics.
This former mayor of Mexico City has a starry-eyed Bill de Blasio-style sensibility. Like the former mayor of New York, Lopez Obrador is attacking inequality and calling for an expansion of welfare spending — but also demanding more efficiency in government and operating as a fiscal pragmatist. As mayor, he brought in Rudy Giuliani as a consultant to reduce crime. He’s charismatic and effective enough to have clawed his way to the presidency.
Seems like voters have decided to send their best to make Mexico great again.
— New York Daily News