Mexico has been ruled by the leftist politician Andrés Manuel López Obrador since Saturday. The 65-year-old took the oath of office in Mexico City as president of the 130-million-inhabitant country.
Mexico’s new left-wing president Andrés Manuel López Obrador has announced after his swearing-in a new political start for the country marked by corruption and violence. With his assumption of office, a turn that would be „peaceful and orderly, but also profound and radical,“ the politician known after his initials as AMLO said on Saturday in Mexico City. He promised not to rob the Mexicans as president.
He would put an end to bribery, impunity and „catastrophic neo-liberal policies,“ added López Obrador. He is Mexico’s first leftist president for decades. The election in July, he won clearly at the head of the he founded four years ago party Morena. In the election campaign he had declared war on poverty, crime and corruption and promised to thoroughly redesign the country.
After being sworn in for a six-year term, OMLA announced plans to begin transforming the country. „Today, not just a new government is starting, today a new political order is beginning,“ he said.
The 65-year-old is a sharp critic of the Institutionalized Revolution Party (PRI) and the Conservative National Action Party (PAN), which has ruled the country since 1929. Critics accuse López Obrador of having no concrete plans to govern Latin America’s second-largest economy, with its approximately 130 million inhabitants.
The Mexican Central Bank has already slightly lowered the growth forecast for 2019 this week. She cited the uncertainty in the face of López Obrador’s economic policy as the reason.
Mexico’s entrepreneurs are extremely skeptical about the new president. They reacted with great annoyance when López Obrador announced in October a freeze for the controversial new capital city airport. The mammoth project had a contract volume of around eleven billion euros.
From the political class of his country, the new president wants to settle by demonstrative modesty. Before taking office, he had announced to cut his salary by half. In addition, he wants to sell the presidential plane and turn Los Pinos, the residence of the head of state, into a cultural center.
After the swearing-in ceremony, AMLO drove in its white Volkswagen Jetta to the central Zócalo Square in Mexico City. There was a second ceremony: Indian shaman cleaned it with incense and handed him a chief staff. López Obrador took him in and swore in front of tens of thousands of people: „I affirm my commitment not to lie to, steal or betray the Mexican people.“
The new president comes from the southeastern state of Tabasco. He began his political career in the 1970s in the long-standing PRI (Institutionalized Revolution Party). At the end of the 1980s, AMLO switched to the new left-wing Democratic Revolutionary Party (PRD). In 1994, he applied in vain for the governorship in his home state.
In 2000, he was elected mayor of Mexico City. In 2006, he narrowly lost in the presidential election against the conservative candidate Felipe Calderón, 2012 also just against the liberal PRI candidate Enrique Peña Nieto.
From this López Obrador inherits, besides the violence in the war of the drug cartels, the difficult relations with the USA. One point of controversy is the wall that US President Donald Trump is planning on the southern border and for which he also wants to pay Mexico.
On the sidelines of the inauguration, Mexico, Guatemala, El Salvador and Honduras signed a „development plan“ to fight the causes of flight. It provides „programs, projects and specific measures to create jobs and fight poverty“. In Honduras in mid-October thousands of migrants from Central America had set off in the direction of the USA.
