Big win in Mexico – the achievements behind the victory
By Tim Young, Labour Friends of Progressive Latin America
On June 2, the right-wing in Mexico suffered a historic defeat.
Claudia Sheinbaum – successor to President Andrés Manuel López Obrador (AMLO) of the MORENA party – won the presidential election by a landslide margin of over 32 points, becoming the first woman and first person of Jewish descent to be elected president.
The election saw Sheinbaum receiving the highest number of votes ever recorded for a candidate, surpassing López Obrador’s record of 30.1 million votes, by achieving just under 36 million votes!
The background to – and crucial to understanding – this victory is that in the last four years Mexico with ‘AMLO’ as President has made remarkable progress in social welfare, education, health, women’s rights, equality for Indigenous people and Afro-Mexicans, and in terms of the recovery of national sovereignty over resources such as petroleum, gas, electric power, water supplies and now lithium.
On the regional and global stage, it has played a leading role in the new progressive tide across Latin America.
As well as being of interest in itself, the success of this agenda also has many lessons for the Left globally.
The goal has been what movement supporters call the “4T” – a Fourth Transformation of the country through a democratic renewal to end corruption and impunity, and benefit the many, not just the few.
The main objective of the 4T agenda is to reverse decades of neoliberal policies and to promote a more equitable and people-centred economic agenda.
Key to this is prioritising social programmes, and there have been moves towards a more universal approach to welfare and social security. The effects are very real – state payments now reach 65% more people than under previous governments.
Alongside this, in an empowering move – and something it feels like we could only dream about currently in Britain – welfare programmes are now enshrined in the Constitution as entitlements rather than ‘hand-outs’.
Other new social programmes have included, but are by no means limited to:
- scholarships to students at various levels, including basic education, high school, and university, alongside vocational training opportunities
- economic support to farmers to promote sustainable rural development
- support for reconstruction efforts in areas affected by natural disasters.
In terms of seeking energy sovereignty and an end of handing over the riches of Mexico’s natural resources to multinational corporations and uber-rich oligarchs, the aim is to put people and public need before corporate greed.
Examples of progress on this front are too numerous the list, but include reining in the power of foreign mining companies through a new Hydrocarbons Law enabling permits to private firms that commit certain violations to be revoked.
Meanwhile strengthening CFE, the state-owned electricity company, has seen limiting the requirement on it to buy electricity from the private sector, meaning less loot for greedy private polluters and profiteers – something we could surely do with in terms of energy here!
This reclaiming of national wealth has helped fund vital state-led investment and infrastructure projects, including a 1,554 km-long intercity railway traversing the Yucatán Peninsula.
Also part of a more prominent role for the state and public sector, halting and reversing privatisations has been both successful and popular. In moves that will be of great interest to activists in Britain, government functions that had been outsourced to private and semi-private firms have been brought back in-house and the situation is now that the subcontracting of public services has been abolished.
Workers’ rights have also improved, starting to shift power in the workplace and economy.
The formal rights of domestic workers are now recognised for the first time, and precarious hiring practices have been eliminated, including through the banning of ‘fire-and-rehire’ style practices. Meanwhile, the process for forming new unions has been simplified.
Action has also been taken on wages and incomes. To give just one example, the largest minimum-wage increase in more than forty years saw the income of the poorest grow by 24% before COVID hit.
Finally, even statutory holidays have doubled – something I’m sure all ‘Briefing’ readers could get behind!
The lesson from Mexico then is clear – Rolling back neo-liberalism not only works, it wins for the Left too!
- You can follow the work of the Mexico Solidarity Forum here.
- Tim Young is an organiser for Labour Friends of Progressive Latin America (LFPLA). You can follow LFPLA on Facebook and Twitter/X.
- This article was originally published in the July-August 2024 edition of Labour Briefing.
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