Mexico’s President Andres Manuel Lopez Obrador recently drew criticism for inviting Russia’s military, along with soldiers from China, Nicaragua, Venezuela and Cuba to participate in a parade to celebrate Mexican independence. The incident added fuel for ongoing debates over whether Mexico’s president, a populist personality who often embraces controversy and seems to revel in stoking conflict with critics, is merely fostering friendships with authoritarian governments in other parts of the world, or whether he has ambitions to undermine democracy in Mexico.
In order to understand Mexico’s controversial president, we need to highlight and differentiate his populist and authoritarian traits. Populist leaders are particularly inclined to embrace conflicts with their critics and political adversaries.
Populism, after all, is by definition infused with a sense of hostility towards elites. Populist leaders draw support from working and middle-class voters by stoking resentment towards traditional business and political power brokers.
Populist leaders often draw extra scrutiny because they often break with established norms and cross the line into embracing authoritarian tactics.
After all, populism often works around the concept of creating a cult of personality around one figure.
Authoritarianism, on the other hand, is based around strict obedience to a leader at the expense of individual freedom.
This dynamic is challenging because authoritarianism, or strongman rule, often goes hand-in-hand with populist rhetoric.
Often, there’s overlap between populist leaders and authoritarian governing strategies.
A populist can rail against the ineffectiveness of Congress, the out of touch Supreme Court, flawed regulatory agencies, and the biased news media. An authoritarian leader, however, will make the jump to arguing that that “will of the people” will best be served by dismantling democratic checks and balances, and concentrating additional power in the hands of the executive. Authoritarian populists such as Hugo Chavez, Rafael Correa, Evo Morales, and more recently, Nayib Bukele, worked to undermine electoral rules to extend their time in power.
In Mexico, the concepts of populism and authoritarianism have become part of the everyday political discourse over the last five years, as Mexico’s current president has embraced fiery populist rhetoric, and also taken some steps towards undermining checks and balances on presidential power. The Economist Intelligence Unit now characterizes Mexico as a mixed-bag, semi-authoritarian hybrid government rather than a full democracy. Many journalists and political analysts in Mexico worry that Lopez Obrador is bending and maybe even breaking democratic norms.
In order to discuss the current political dynamic in Mexico and see how it compares to other countries in Latin America, I reached out to Will Grant, a veteran Latin America-focused journalist and author of an engaging new book called ¡Populista! The Rise of Latin America’s 21st Century Strongman.
Nathaniel Parish Flannery: First of all, let’s set the stage a bit. What qualities or attributes do these leaders you write about have in common? What 3 words would you choose to describe the leaders you wrote about in your book?
Will Grant: In a sense, I tried to show in the book just how different these leaders and their political projects were to each other — in part to counteract the view in parts of the media which tended to homogenise them all under the umbrella-term of the ‘Pink Tide’. That being said, there is a clear and very pronounced vein of similar traits which run though most populist leaders in Latin America. It has to do with their often explicit proclamation that “I am the people and the people are me”. As such, their suggestion to the electorate goes, a vote against me would be a vote against yourselves. With the most extreme examples, they demanded nothing less than complete loyalty to their cause and to themselves as leaders. In terms of three words, I might suggest iconoclast — as these men all built their platforms by railing against the politics of the past and trying to break down existing political institutions and norms in their nations. All delivered, of course, with a sizeable dose of anti-americanism or anti-Washington rhetoric too! For example, Rafael Correa created a new political party to take power while Hugo Chavez — who had attempted a coup a few years earlier — campaigned on breaking something called the Agreement of Punto Fijo, which had seen power pass between just two parties for years. They are also messianic — the savior complex is very evident in all of the figures I examined as was the sort of pseudo-religious beatification of the leader. Never was that clearer to me than at Hugo Chavez’s funeral, in which a handout was given out with a version of the Lord’s Prayer made for Chavez: “Our Chavez, who art in heaven…” Lastly, I’d say autocratic — both the political project and the leadership over it are so tightly intertwined that they ultimately become one and the same thing. Chavismo took over all shades of the Left in Venezuela while Orteguismo drowned out the Sandinistas altogether, and so on. Even the PT in Brazil became, in essence, the Lula Party. For some of the leaders, that also involves the (brutal) quashing of all dissent. Meaningful political opponents were jailed or exiled, both from the opposition and from within the movement itself. Indeed, there is also an effort to change the constitution to allow indefinite re-election: the insatiable desire to hold onto power for power itself
Parish Flannery: You do not include a chapter on Mexico’s President Andres Manuel Lopez Obrador in your book. Do you think he fits the same mold of authoritarian populism that you document in your book? If you had the chance to add a chapter on Lopez Obrador in a second edition of the book, would you include him?
Grant: I was primarily interested in the period of the Pink Tide, which I defined as from the arrival to power of Hugo Chavez in 1999 to the death of Fidel Castro in 2016. The book of course goes into detail about how the leaders reached their zeniths and tries to place their rules into the local, national and international contexts. Given that Lopez Obrador narrowly didn’t take power in 2006, I chose not to include him. However, he is clearly part of the modern populist landscape in Latin America. In power, he is displaying many of the same traits as some of the leaders included in my book and while the Mexican reality is very different to that of Venezuela or Brazil or Bolivia or Nicaragua, he is clearly worthy of detailed scrutiny by anyone interested in populist trends in the Americas today. For me, any future editions of my book still wouldn’t include him as mine is a study of a very specific time period — the years of the Pink Tide — and I think it would only muddy the waters to try to include him too. However, all of the big ideas of my book are undoubtedly present in Lopez Obrador. His political project — the so-called Fourth Transformation of Mexico — has him alone as its figurehead, revered as a saint-like figure to his most faithful followers. Many of the key characteristics from his spiky relationship to the press to an increasingly authoritarian streak and dependence on the military have their echoes in the leaders at the turn of the 21st Century. Yet, as I try to show in the book, the things he is doing and saying are also nothing new in this particular part of the world: the strongman or ‘caudillo’ tendency is as old as politics in Latin America itself.
Parish Flannery: I’m wondering how some of the trends we are seeing in Mexico compare to the patterns you documented in your book. For instance— Mexico’s President Lopez Obrador has cultivated very tight ties with Mexico’s military, putting the military in charge of many key infrastructure projects and social programs, letting the military run a new civilian airport in Mexico City, putting the military in charge of his flagship Mayan train for tourists and now he’s even working to launch a state-subsidized airline which will be managed by the military and has talked about letting the army run hotels and resorts, too.
Grant: The turn to the military — and a heavy reliance on it for an extremely wide range of duties — is absolutely key to the populist leader in the Americas. In Chavez’s case, he came from a military background and had no qualms whatsoever in radicalising the military under his own ‘Bolivarian’ banner. The building of big infrastructure projects to leave their stamp on the nation is also a constant — from airports to cable-cars over the slums. In AMLO’s case, it has been an extremely prominent part of his presidency, even when those projects, as often the case, overrun in budget, are questionable in location or have serious environmental impacts, as in the example of the Tren Maya. In Bolivia, for example, I wrote about Evo Morales’ focus on a highway which would bisect the TIPNIS biosphere and national park. It created a permanent and irrevocable split with the indigenous groups of that region. AMLO, whose background was also in indigenous rights many years ago, runs the same risk with his Tren Maya. Meanwhile, his use of the military for tasks beyond security, looks set to be one of the defining characteristics of his time in power. As will a very fractious relationship with the media. Any attempt to put these criticisms to him is met with the most robust defense which often quickly becomes an attack on the journalist or the media outlet they represent. Again, a non-harmonious relationship with the media, who — unless they are specifically friendly media outlets — are portrayed as part of some kind of elitist plot to discredit the government, is absolutely intrinsic to the populist’s political appeal.
Check out the full conversation about between Will Grant and Nathaniel Parish Flannery here.
Read the full article here
