Claudia Sheinbaum’s election as president of Mexico last year was in some ways surprising, as scholar Margaret Cerullo noted when Sheinbaum won. “Not only has a left-wing Jewish woman been elected president of an overwhelmingly Catholic country (a country steeped in machismo where women only gained the vote in the 1950s), she won by a landslide (30 points, as the vote count nears completion).” Sheinbaum’s victory was resounding, but it was explicable: Her party, the National Regeneration Movement (MORENA), had built enormous credibility with the people of Mexico during the six-year term of her predecessor, Andrés Manuel López Obrador. As Kurt Hackbarth wrote for Jacobin: 

MORENA in government passed a raft of worker-friendly legislation over its first term. This included increased employer contributions to the AFORE system of individual retirement accounts, union reform providing for secret-ballot elections and the mandatory renegotiating of contracts, an outsourcing law prohibiting companies from contracting out their core functions and increasing the formula paid in profit sharing, disability benefits, and a doubling of vacation days and the minimum wage.

Similarly, Novara Media praises MORENA’s accomplishment:

Morena’s achievements can’t be denied. Since coming to power in 2018, the party has extended pensions, raised the minimum wage, increased student grants, launched public works, reformed labour laws and passed constitutional amendments to recognise indigenous and Afro-Mexican communities. Between 2018 and 2022, around six million people moved out of official poverty, and the effective renationalisation of the oil and electricity sectors was the “recuperation of energy sovereignty,”* says Ignacio García Ponce, a historian and educator with agrarian workers. “López Obrador’s term was extraordinary, and it surpassed the expectations of many, including my own,” he says. “It changed the order of things. It initiated the end of neoliberalism, and gave the final kick to the authoritarian regime.” All this was achieved with a party that barely existed a decade ago, and in a governance system dominated by traditional cliques. 

López Obrador promised nothing less than a “fourth transformation” of the country (the most recent “transformation” being the Mexican Revolution), which included an ambitious agenda to tackle inequality and grand infrastructure projects like an intercity rail line through the Yucatán Peninsula. (Which has attracted criticism for failure to incorporate the input of indigenous locals and its contribution to deforestation.)

The extent to which López Obrador actually transformed the country is hotly debate. An AMLO biographer says that it was “a watershed presidency that has changed the direction of the country.” Hackbarth is quoted as having called AMLO a “once-in-a-lifetime, charismatic politician” of “unrepeatable quality.” On the other hand, critics on the left claim that AMLO’s achievements have been overrated, argue that he never really took on the ruling class, blame him for cooperation with the U.S. on American deportation policy, and condemn him for militarization of the state and authoritarianism. The World Socialist Website writes:

AMLO’s social welfare and minimum wage policies have been strictly aimed at suppressing the increasingly explosive class struggle in Mexico. These policies have not impinged on the profit interests of the ruling elite, which is making record profits, and have had a minimum effect on moving Mexicans out of poverty.

There is thus a dispute over whether AMLO’s poverty-reduction programs should be credited with “lifting millions out of poverty” or criticized for a failure to fundamentally alter the economic structure of society. But even if the effects of AMLO’s presidency were overstated, as a U.S. leftist, I find it difficult not to look at the recent history of Mexican politics and feel simultaneously inspired by the country’s example and depressed by our own comparative failure. Contrast AMLO’s jubilant end of term with the pitiful, unpopular calamity of the Biden administration. In the example of Mexico, we can see a strong rebuttal of several arguments that are commonly used to deflect criticism of Biden: incumbent parties were simply unpopular all over the world, Biden did everything he could, etc. The differences between Biden and AMLO are striking: AMLO was more ambitious, committed himself loudly and proudly to a transformative agenda, backed it up not only with rhetoric but with real social democratic programs that had visible effects in people’s lives. He built things they could see. Contrast that with the Biden administration’s promise to spend $42 billion building out rural internet infrastructure, which got bogged down in bureaucracy and never went anywhere.

Contrast AMLO’s raise of the minimum wage with what happened here, where Biden gave up on raising the scandalously low minimum wage. Now, not all of Biden’s failures were Biden’s fault (Congressional Republicans, of course, oppose virtually every worthwhile thing, and Joe Manchin and Kyrsten Sinema did their best to thwart anything social democratic). But AMLO also demonstrated how to rally popular support through leadership. Contrast his combative, lively daily press conferences with Biden’s complete absence from the press. Biden hid away from public view, in part, because he was not capable of speaking extemporaneously without his physical decline becoming obvious. AMLO did a press conference for two hours a day, five days a week. (A bit excessive, really.) Sheinbaum has kept up the morning press conferences, albeit with somewhat more concision. AMLO could inspire the public in part because he was communicating with the public. This is another lesson from the FDR era that Democrats have failed to learn (although it was recently reported that Democrats are trying to get back in touch with the people by… going on sports podcasts). 

Now Claudia Sheinbaum has succeeded AMLO and quickly dispelled doubts about whether she could match his popularity. Leftist and populist presidents often fail to cultivate competent successors (see Chavez in Venezuela, Lula in Brazil, Morales in Bolivia), but Sheinbaum has, astonishingly, already exceeded AMLO’s popularity, with a staggering 85 percent approval rating. She has benefitted from Trump’s antagonism of Mexico, which has led to an outpouring of nationalist sentiment (as it has in Canada). But she has also been praised for her strength in negotiating with Trump, repeatedly getting him to back off planned tariffs. She’s gotten concessions out of Trump in part by understanding his psychology, for instance by launching an anti-fentanyl ad campaign “largely designed to impress the U.S. government” (indeed, Trump was so impressed that he “soon announced a multimillion-dollar campaign of his own,” meaning that both countries are now spending millions on likely worthless ad campaigns). She has at times made apparently meaningless promises that seem to give Trump a win while in fact simply reiterating Mexico’s existing position. She has “routinely shadowboxed with Trump, participating in his for-show negotiations while just as happily rolling her eyes and trolling him — making fun of Trump for demanding things Mexico has already delivered, for instance, or proposing, after Trump unilaterally declared the Gulf of Mexico be known as the Gulf of America, that the United States be renamed Mexican America.” She has emerged “looking even and measured,” in the words of Carin Zissis, a fellow at the Mexico Institute of the Wilson Center in Washington.

One can reasonably ask whether Sheinbaum actually deserves credit here for much other than an appearance of poise. Trump’s tariffs are self-destructive to the United States, and his repeated climb-downs may not so much be the result of steely Mexican presidential leadership as the realization that his actions are actually likely to hurt his presidency when they take full effect. We ought to be careful about treating Sheinbaum as the heroic North American champion of social democracy in the age of Trump. There is plenty to criticize, including her support for fossil fuels (despite being a climate scientist) and cooperation with Trump’s effort to prevent migrant caravans from reaching the U.S. border. Nevertheless, leadership is in part about inspiring people, and even the appearance of standing firm in the face of Trump’s attempts to humiliate and impoverish Mexico is better than what many domestic Democrats have mustered so far. (Leading Democratic advisor James Carville actually advised his party to “roll over and play dead”!) 

When AMLO left office, it was clear that his presidency had had real effects at least for some Mexicans. For instance: 

“He did a very huge thing: pulling us out of the abyss of poverty,” said Gilgenio López Aguilar, of Pueblo Nuevo Solistahuacán in the southern state of Chiapas. Mr. López Aguilar, 76, said he no longer has to sell dried horse manure just to earn enough for beans and tortillas.

AMLO said that the “poor came first,” and many of them felt that he meant it. It’s very hard to imagine U.S. Democrats saying that the “poor come first” (it’s always the “middle class” with them). What happened to López Aguilar is tangible and meaningful. Old age benefits were doubled, so an old man didn’t have to sell dried horse manure to buy beans. That is a real thing that happened. Of course, mere cash transfers are limited in what they can accomplish. But by the end of the Biden administration, these kinds of real-world success stories were few and far between. Except during the pandemic, when social spending accomplished tangible changes (many of which were cruelly undone afterwards), people did not feel and see the effects of government in a positive way. We can see that in Mexico, delivering for people and communicating with them made a massive difference. It allowed Morena to buck the trend of incumbent parties going down to defeat. In many ways, Morena is more pragmatic and compromising than I would like, and the left can’t celebrate a political project that is tied to austerity even as it increases social welfare. I think the best way to think about Mexican politics in the U.S. is to see it as the bare minimum we should be able to expect: leaders who prioritize the poor, who don’t accept right-wing premises, who take climate change at least moderately seriously, who invest in infrastructure, and who do not kowtow to Trump’s right-wing agenda. Claudia Sheinbaum is not actually that impressive, yet she has managed to win broad popular support. This shows just how few excuses U.S. Democrats have for their pitiful failures of leadership. Mexico shows what we could have if we had even a modestly functional social democratic opposition.