Mexico’s most popular president in decades is retiring. What will he leave behind?

MEXICO CITY (AP) — Many Mexicans will feel a deep sense of loss as popular, charismatic, nationalist President Andrés Manuel López Obrador leaves office on September 30 — and that’s no surprise.

López Obrador himself has spent an inordinate amount of time talking about his own legacy — and his place in history — during his six-year term, something he brings up in nearly every one of his marathon interviews. daily press conferences at 7am.

But what legacy will the rumpled, grinning López Obrador leave behind? It’s perhaps the most important question for a man obsessed with history, and one thing seems clear: He has changed the way politics is done in Mexico, perhaps forever.

In contrast to decades of reserved and distant presidents, López 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, “You can’t have a rich government with poor people.”

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

“He feels nostalgia for some of the social structures of the 1970s in Mexico and nostalgia for the family,” said Pérez Ricart.

Will his legacy resemble that of U.S. President Franklin D. Roosevelt, whose New Deal created lasting institutions like Social Security and mortgage programs that created a huge, stable middle class?

The Mexican leader bases his movement on social welfare and likes to compare himself to Roosevelt. Many Mexicans hold him in the same affection as the more patrician FDR did in his day.

“I think he will be remembered as a president who brought about great changes and thought about the people,” said Armando López, 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 that average 2 1/2 hours. He tells jokes, talks about his favorite foods, lashes out at critical journalistsridicules 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 each year — even though his own officials have contradicted himWhen murders spiked this year — despite his claims of an 18% reduction — he simply ignored the numbers.

Many Mexicans seem willing to tolerate the falsehoods, in part because López Obrador, 70, is a master of a key Mexican proverb: “He who gets angry loses.” He brushes aside real contradictions and problems with a laugh, a stubborn refusal to discuss them or his standard phrase: “I have other data.”

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.

Influenced by 20th century Mexican presidents, López Obrador has been eager to make his mark on major infrastructure projects – he is obsessed with railways and oil refineries — and large state-owned companies like those that dominated the Mexican economy in the 1970s, its formative years.

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 been able to make much of an impression on foreign policy, apart from a few rather pointless, unresolved disputes with Spain, the Vatican, Ecuador and Peru. Under pressure from the US, he has not deployed the 120,000-member National Guard he created to confront 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.

Could López Obrador be a figure like Argentina’s president of the 1940s and 1950s, Juan Perón, who left behind an ideologically amorphous legacy that was fought over for decades by the various wings of his movement?

“I think we are going to see the ‘balkanization’ of Obradorism,” Pérez Ricart said, “a dispute between left and right to claim the term, a bit like what happened with Peronism in Argentina.”

Or he could go down in history as the person who, however briefly, revived Mexico’s nearly century-old tradition of a “state party,” like the old PRI, where López Obrador began his political career. The PRI governed Mexico for 70 years before corruption, internal conflict and economic crisis brought it down.

Some of López Obrador’s most devoted followers seem surprisingly willing to take the risk of another PRI.

“If after 70 years we discover we made a mistake, well, that’s life,” Fiesco said.

López Obrador may be part of a regional revival of old, populist state party models, on both the left and the right.

The president of El Salvador, for example Nayib Bukele stresses that his government – which even achieved bigger re-elections than López Obradors Morena – is a “hegemonic party, not a state party.”

That is pretty much exactly how Morena supporters describe their movement. But once a party starts using the power of the government to keep itself in power, that distinction disappears.

Most people think it is unlikely that Morena will remain in power for as long as the PRI’s seven-decade reign.

“Times have changed, that’s not possible anymore,” said Armando López, the street sweeper. “People will support him as long as they get something in return. They won’t follow him blindly.”

The Morena party was cobbled together by López Obrador from old PRI members like himself and people with more left-wing backgrounds. López Obrador is Morena’s star, his guide, his moral authority. Once he’s gone, the tensions within the party — already palpable — are likely to only increase.

López Obrador is very aware of this and has from the beginning deliberately built structures to guard his legacy, which he sees as his own, not the party’s. He has more economic and law enforcement power He has turned to the military more than any other Mexican president because the military obeys him unconditionally and he trusts them.

Perhaps his longest-lasting legacy will be the structural changes: the militarization of law enforcement and large parts of the economy, the elimination of all independent regulatory and supervisory bodiesthe frequent attacks on the media and a legal review Critics say this will weaken democratic checks and balances.

Mexico’s armed forces now control airports, trains, customs offices and even an airline.

“The truth is there is one very important legacy, and that is the legacy of militarization,” said Guadalupe Correa-Cabrera, an associate professor at George Mason University.