Mexico’s most popular president retires, this is what he leaves behind | World News

In contrast to decades of reserved and distant presidents, Lopez Obrador has built deep personal bonds with many Mexicans. He has stripped the office of the thousands of presidential guards, limousines and walled complexes that once characterized it, saying that you can’t have a rich government with poor people.

He is a politician who evokes familiarity, he reminds people of a father, an uncle, a grandfather,” said Carlos Perez Ricart, a political analyst at the Mexican Center for Economic Research and Education. That is no coincidence either. Lopez Obrador constantly praises the traditional family, saying it saved the country.

He does feel nostalgic for some of the social structures of the 1970s in Mexico and for the family, Perez Ricart said.

“I think he will be remembered as a president who brought about great changes and thought about the people,” said Armando Lopez, 60, who works as a street sweeper.

Marina Fiesco, an office worker taking a break with her 11-year-old son in a Mexico City park, expressed similar sentiments.

I think he does think about the people, Fiesco said. It’s not about left or right, a president has to take care of the people.

Part of that connection is that he talks more and answers more questions than any other leader in the world.

In his six years in office, he has held about 1,400 televised morning briefings, each lasting an average of 2 1/2 hours. He tells jokes, talks about his favorite foods, lashes out at critical journalists, ridicules the opposition and sometimes plays his favorite music videos. Most briefings end with him saying, “Let’s have breakfast.”

He often says things that aren’t true. He claims that Mexico doesn’t produce fentanyl, the deadly synthetic opioid that kills about 70,000 Americans a year, even though his own officials have contradicted him. When the murder rate spiked this year, despite his claims of an 18 percent reduction, he simply ignored the numbers.

Many Mexicans seem willing to tolerate the untruths, in part because Lopez Obrador, 70, is a master of a key Mexican proverb: Anger is defeat. He brushes aside real contradictions and problems with a smile, a stubborn refusal to talk about them, or his standard line, I have other information.

He is probably the most skilled politician ever to govern Mexico, and he seems to possess an unstoppable motivating force: in all his thousands of hours of conversation, he has never sat down, taken a sip of water or gone to the bathroom.

Lopez Obrador, who was influenced by Mexican presidents of the 20th century, has wanted to put his stamp on big infrastructure projects. He is obsessed with railroads, oil refineries and large state-owned companies like those that dominated Mexico’s economy in the 1970s, the years that shaped him.

But his construction projects are often poorly planned and will be subject to the devastating trends of economic and energy transition. Unlike his past heroes, he has failed to nationalize any industry and has only been able to fight a rearguard action to defend the debt-ridden, struggling state oil and electricity companies he inherited.

Nor has he made much of an impression on foreign policy, aside from a few rather pointless, unresolved disputes with Spain, the Vatican, Ecuador and Peru. Under pressure from the US, he has deployed the 120,000-member National Guard he created not to take on drug cartels but to prevent migrants from reaching the US border.

And its social programs, such as the $150 monthly benefit for people over 65, could disappear, lose funding or be eroded by inflation.

First publication: Sep 25, 2024 | 11:27 AM IST