A Few Thoughts on Mexican Politics from a Non-Specialist Married to a Mexicanist
By 
DJW’s post on the Mexican judicial elections made me want to add a bit from my perspective of someone who spends a lot of time in the country. That said, I am not a Mexicanist and my Spanish is bad. So I am not an expert and I want to make that very clear. But I am married to an expert and have had a lot of conversations with people in Mexico about their politics over these years (granted though that these are mostly limited to people who speak pretty good English, a quite self-selecting group of people). So take this with a grain of salt, but here are a few thoughts about modern Mexico. Incidentally and not at all surprisingly, Morena did get what it wanted in these elections.
First, the biggest part of the reason Andres Manuel Lopez Obrador’s and now Claudia Sheinbaum’s left-populism works is the deep and horrifying corruption of Mexico. I think it’s important to note that for all the horrors of the drug trade and cartel violence, the bigger, more structural issue within Mexico for Mexicans seems to be the corruption that allows it all to happen. The impunity with which the gangsters operate is pretty shocking. Many, many officials are more than happy to be bought off. It’s true that those who resist very much risk their lives and so it’s hard to damn anyone’s choices here, not at the barrel of a gun, but the corruption includes lots of people who would never see such guns–high level police officials, political leaders at the state and federal levels, prison officials, judges etc. The violence tends to be targeted a few different groups–other gangs of course, innocents caught up in it, journalists, and local politicians who dare stand up, such as mayoral candidates. The cartels aren’t killing Mexico City and Guadalajara political elites, by and large. So AMLO’s response for the time being was to give the military more power than it ever had before. One good reason for that is that the military is probably the least corrupted institution in Mexico. Mexicans have a very good reason to hate the PAN–it was Felipe Calderon’s crackdown on the big cartels that unleashed this violence in the first place by destabilizing the drug trade and the naked corruption that already existed in Mexican society only got worse under his presidency and then the worthless last PRI president Enrique Pena Nieto who followed.
Second, you cannot overestimate the love for AMLO among the Mexican people. When I mean love, I mean love. The night taco stand near where my wife lived in Oaxaca and a mural of AMLO lovingly holding a human heart on the wall, representing how he loved Mexicans so much. This kind of thing is all over the place and in southern Mexico at least, you simply don’t see political symbolism for opposing parties, who might as well not exist. Sheinbaum is popular much more because she’s AMLO’s chosen replacement than anything she has done. This is FDR in 1940 level of love among the Mexican working classes. The exceptions are in the PAN strongholds that go back to the Cristero Rebellion against the ruling PRI in the 1920s in the super Catholic states such as Aguascalientes and Guanajuato.
Third, Morena has basically taken over the PRI and integrated it into the AMLO machine. The PRI effectively no longer exists, though Morena has certainly empowered old PRI officials on the local level to keep up what they are doing. What AMLO provided and Sheinbaum continues is the personalist politics that the PRI had forgotten with their endless horrible presidents after the 1950s but which more or less continued in the towns and villages. The PRI was still the party of the Revolution for a lot of people and it solidified that, to a point, with things such as local patronage and gift-giving. But nationally, the PRI was ripe for defeat due to its own corruption and incompetence. That’s what opened the door to the PAN presidents of Vicente Fox and then Calderon in the first place. AMLO had long stood up against such corruption, first in the quite possibly stolen presidential election of 2006 and then as mayor of Mexico City. But once he wrested power from the PRI and made the nation about him, he could then integrate the PRI on the local level and make it beholden to him while also making those local officials–and the patronage infrastructure they had–work for him.
Fourth, what this all means is that AMLO/Sheinbaum have taken the PRI patronage politics and turned them into a politics of personal crusade against the corruption of Mexican society, including the judicial system. Now, if you want to find people who hate AMLO but who are not PANistas, the answer is the intellectual class. They see AMLO/Sheinbaum for what they are–hucksters basically. In short, AMLO did nothing for the nation’s terrible education system and even reduced its financing. But he could get away with that by the proverbial chicken in every pot for holidays. For example, there are so, so many small villages in Mexico. One AMLO plan was to provide a paved road to all of them. He didn’t succeed in that, though he did make progress. That alone is more than the PRI or the PAN has ever done for those villages. So you have a lot of Mexicans who are used to bad schools, a failing infrastructure, feckless leaders, etc. They can live with those things if they get something out of the ordinary and AMLO is tremendously skilled as providing that out of the ordinary experience. So if you are actually a policy expert, concerned with ideas of good governance, want to create some form of modern liberalism in Mexico, etc., AMLO was pretty much of a disaster. But most people don’t care about any of those things.
So in short, you have a frustrated but patient Mexican population, a nation whose people understands the terribleness of everything around them and are willing to put their faith in the hands of a new party that at least makes claims of change. They know that change won’t come overnight and so they are patient with AMLO/Sheinbaum because they know that the PRI is worthless and the PAN is even worse than worthless.
Thus, it’s hardly surprising that most Mexicans would vote to increase Morena power over the judiciary. What has the judiciary done for them?
And if this is more about AMLO than Sheinbaum, that’s because we need to be clear who is by far the more important political figure in Mexico. And it’s not the current president.