A recent Gallup poll tallied the approval rating of Andrés Manuel López Obrador (AMLO) of the Morena party, now six years into his presidential administration in Mexico, at 80 percent.1 In October, he will hand off power to Claudia Sheinbaum, his longtime political protégé. Sheinbaum achieved a landslide victory in the presidential elections on June 2, garnering close to 60 percent of the vote, more than 30 percentage points ahead of the runner-up. The main opposition parties — the Institutional Revolutionary Party (PRI), the National Action Party (PAN), and the already diminished Party of the Democratic Revolution (PRD) — which ran together as a coalition this time, lost significant ground compared to 2018, securing about 27 percent of the vote, around 10 percentage points less than their combined total in the previous general election. In this recent contest, Morena, formed just over a decade ago, secured a two-thirds supermajority in the Chamber of Deputies and fell just two representatives short of achieving the same in the Senate. How should we understand the success of the electoral left in contemporary Mexico?
This article offers an outline of the model of reform pushed by AMLO, what he calls the country’s “fourth transformation of public life.” AMLO, who handily triumphed in the previous elections, frames Morena’s mission as spearheading this cuarta transformación. Linking Morena’s program to the momentous events of the war of independence in the 1810s, the liberal state reforms of the 1850s, and the early twentieth-century Mexican Revolution, AMLO envisioned the 2018 victory less as a change in government than as a transformative regime change. To what extent, then, is Morena’s electoral success the emergence of an entirely new social pact?
In what follows, I present an account of AMLO’s rise and his years of government as well as the historical trajectory of the Mexican left during the neoliberal era. The aim is to develop conceptual clarity that can help us make sense of the magnitude of Morena’s rise. I make three broad points. The first is that the distinctive feature, comparatively and historically, of AMLO’s project is his progressive reframing of anti-corruption politics. I trace the electoral left in the context of the period of the “transition to democracy” that began in the late 1990s, when the PRI, which governed for most of the twentieth century, lost its grip on power for the first time. The argument here is that the Right was able to capitalize on this transition so that the struggle against the PRI came to be equated with a general anti-statism, lending neoliberalism a prodemocratic, antiestablishment edge. It took a quarter century for the electoral left to cut through with a redistributive program that cast neoliberalism itself as corruption. Second, I argue that this platform was premised on a diagnosis of corruption as a specific neoliberal political economy — not a series of isolated scandals or moral failings but a particular logic of capital accumulation. Third, I reason that AMLO’s tenure is better understood as post-neoliberal rather than anti-neoliberal, a reshaping of the relationship between state and market in a society already deeply transformed by decades of neoliberalism. Post-neoliberalism here aspires to relegitimize the state as a social actor and to reignite class politics. It aims, in other words, to revamp a developmentalist state — and to do so assuming that certain key features of neoliberal discourse and practice, such as global free trade, foreign investment–led growth, and macroeconomic orthodoxy, are irreversible. Furthermore, its emerging attributes are constrained by the structural limits imposed by decades of neoliberalism: a dilapidated state apparatus and a disarticulated working class.
The text below is organized, accordingly, in three parts. First, I recount the decades of failure of the electoral left in Mexico during the neoliberal period; second, I parse out AMLO’s reading of neoliberalism as a political economy of corruption; and third, I outline the features of actually existing post-neoliberalism in the country.
Neoliberalism as Democracy?
AMLO’s administration is a late example of the “pink tide” governments that swept South America beginning in the early 2000s. While the tide has experienced its ebbs and flows in recent years, it never reached Mexico during its height. This is puzzling, as oft-cited factors that explain the left turn in the South — the confluence of third-wave democratization, increased poverty, and anemic economic growth associated with the neoliberalism of the ’80s and ’90s — were also present in Mexico. While these conditions set the stage for the Left to sweep South America, in Mexico this context led to three neoliberal center-right governments since 2000 and two decades of electoral defeat for the Left. Understanding AMLO’s rise requires an account of this critical period of failure.
The PRI, notorious for embracing a broad ideological umbrella, ruled Mexico without interruption from 1929 to 2000. And while the government routinely practiced electoral fraud and resorted to violent crackdowns on opposition, it also created a dense network of corporatist and clientelist relations, enabling it to co-opt emerging grassroots worker and peasant leaders. In other words, the sectors theoretically most prone to oppositional left-leaning mobilization were already organized under the PRI.
A key Mexican Marxist thinker of the 1960s, José Revueltas, explained, for example, that the working masses “participate in a real and effective way in the activities of the bourgeois party [the PRI] because — aside from compulsion — in the worst of cases they believe that at least they are not doing it for the party itself but for the union of which they are members.” The party, he contended, “can penetrate its organizational filaments all the way to the deepest layers of the population and thus impede the development of class politics.”2 This had a severe effect on the political organization of the electoral left. As a consequence of PRI rule, Mexico’s left developed without a social base and without a fully formed program of its own.
The stunted development of the Left is perhaps best captured by AMLO’s own trajectory. Part of why it is hard for observers to place AMLO in the cartography of political ideologies (arguments abound inside and outside the country over whether he is left-wing or not) is because his political path is entirely peculiar to twentieth-century Mexico. He does not come from the socialist or social democratic left like his European counterparts. And he does not come from militant union activism like Luiz Inácio Lula da Silva or Evo Morales in South America. López Obrador was a member of the PRI early in his career, when the organization — the heir, after all, to an early twentieth-century agrarian revolution — still contained a strong progressive nationalist wing.
At the time, the PRI was the only vehicle for getting into public service. AMLO’s first post in the 1970s was as the head of the Indigenous Affairs Office, an agency carrying out local community-development projects, in his home state of Tabasco. In the 1980s, he was forced to step down after a seven-month stint as the state-level president of the PRI for his attempts to democratize the organization. The PRI’s hard turn toward neoliberalism over the course of that decade left the party’s nationalist wing isolated, eventually provoking a full break. AMLO left, beginning his long march to power as a central member of the opposition.
The PRI during the twentieth century presided over a mixed state-market economy. As the party consolidated power through corporatist arrangements, state enterprises and union leadership became synonymous with wasteful mismanagement and corruption. In the ’80s and ’90s, active opposition parties — in particular the conservative PAN — became strong advocates of privatization, arguing that dismantling the network of corruption that drained public resources required breaking the state’s monopolistic hold on certain sectors of the economy and opening them to market competition. The discourse of privatization and union busting in Mexico came paired with an idiosyncratic veneer of democratization, as anti-PRI forces were ideologically organized around free-market fundamentalism. The PAN governed the country between 2000 and 2012.
The electoral left of the period was hence poorly placed to take advantage of the antiauthoritarian sentiment that coalesced against the PRI. The PRD, the principal party of the Left, was formed out of the nationalist left’s break with the PRI and the merging of small socialist organizations. Led at the time by Cuauhtémoc Cárdenas, who would go on to fail to win the presidency three times, the PRD obtained limited results. Both legislative chambers, for example, were alternately controlled by the PRI and PAN for over two decades, with the PRD capturing about a quarter of seats on average. AMLO, then a member of the PRD, did, however, become Mexico City’s mayor in 2000, acquiring a national spotlight.
After surmounting a highly partisan attempt to impeach him (a process stopped short by the massive street mobilizations that marked the beginning of obradorismo as a movement), he ran for president in 2006, losing by less than 1 percent amid serious irregularities. But even in that election, AMLO captured only around 35 percent of the electorate. He won over less in the subsequent election in 2012, losing to a fully neoliberalized PRI returning to power for the 2012–18 term. The PRD itself eventually drifted to the right, collaborating with President Enrique Peña Nieto of the PRI on major neoliberal reforms — one reason why AMLO split and registered Morena in 2014.
Anti-Neoliberalism as Anti-Corruption
The exiting Peña Nieto administration presided over anemic economic growth that left poverty levels, which hovered around 50 percent, basically untouched. The death toll of the drug war, already in the hundreds of thousands, grew to a historic peak in 2018. High-profile corruption cases plagued the PRI administration. Much-touted free-market reforms like opening Pemex (the state-owned oil company) to private investment and weakening teachers’ unions as a way to supposedly improve the school system failed to deliver the promised results. But the PRI was not the only major political party that entered the 2018 electoral cycle in disarray. The PAN, which governed the country between 2000 and 2012, devolved into a faux opposition during Peña Nieto’s presidency, supporting most of his proposed major reforms en bloc. The PRD, which nominated AMLO in his two previous runs, entered into a crisis after the 2012 defeat. The party’s centrists took over, severing ties with AMLO and launching a full-blown rebranding of the party as a collaborationist, “responsible” left. The party went on to sign the Pact for Mexico, pledging to focus on shared political goals with Peña Nieto’s administration. This marked the beginning of its end as a leftist opposition party and doomed attempts to pivot to an antiestablishment message later.
Public debate during the 2018 electoral contest was dominated by the issue of corruption. PRI president Peña Nieto left office with the lowest approval rating on record in the country at 24 percent. This dismal figure reflected, among other things, the widespread discontent stemming from a series of high-profile corruption scandals that came to define his administration. Under Peña Nieto’s leadership, Mexico’s ranking in Transparency International’s Corruption Perception Index plummeted by thirty-three places, landing at 138 out of the 180 countries evaluated by the end of his term. During the previous administration, that of Felipe Calderón of the PAN, Mexico had already seen a decline in its ranking from 70 to 105.
Anti-corruption became the principal component of AMLO’s campaign discourse and subsequently, as we will see, of his economic program. Running under the newly minted Morena party, AMLO focused his campaign on three axes: ending corruption, regaining peace, and using the state as an engine for redistributive development. He saw these issues as fundamentally connected: corruption crippled the state’s capacity to energize the economy, and the growth of organized crime was a consequence of the abandonment of the redistributive role of the state. Central to this understanding was his claim that neoliberalism was defined by corruption. As he put it in his inaugural speech:
This is why I insist that the hallmark of neoliberalism is corruption. It sounds harsh, but privatization in Mexico has been synonymous with corruption. Unfortunately, this malady has almost always existed in our country, but what happened during the neoliberal period is unprecedented in modern times — the system as a whole has operated for corruption. Political power and economic power have mutually fed and nurtured each other, and the theft of the people’s goods and the nation’s wealth has been established as the modus operandi.3
Indeed, what distinguishes AMLO’s anti-corruption discourse is the connection he makes to neoliberalism. Traditionally, anti-corruption efforts had been championed by the neoliberal right (and not only in Mexico) and, at least in the case of Latin America, backed mostly by the middle and upper classes. AMLO’s is a diagnosis of the characteristics of actually existing neoliberalism in Mexico, which differ from those of neoliberalism in the abstract. In short, AMLO conceptualizes corruption as a central component of Mexico’s specific political economy. For López Obrador, corruption is not merely a series of individual crimes or isolated scandals; it is a consequence of the reconfiguration of the state-economy relationship over the past decades. Corruption has become integral to a regime of private accumulation by way of the state.
In this view, neoliberalism produced a sort of reverse-rentier state where government officials and a complex network of contractors siphoned off public funds through various mechanisms — not always illegal — that ranged from the outsourcing of government functions to, in extreme cases, the creation of parallel shell companies. This conceptualization contrasts with the more conventional notion whereby business elites compete in the shadows — through graft — for market-oriented investment opportunities and other perks and competitive advantages. The conglomeration of politicians and companies dependent on government contracts can be understood as a specific class fraction within Mexican neoliberalism in the sense that their profits are not derived from surplus over investment in production and sale of goods or services in the free market but from the extraction of public resources.
This perspective is diametrically opposed to the dominant opinion of past decades, associated with the so-called democratic transition, that understood neoliberal reforms — explicitly or implicitly — as an anti-corruption tool. As laid out earlier, much of neoliberalism’s expansion in Mexico progressed hand in hand with gradual democratization in the 1990s and early 2000s, as the PRI began to lose its political grip. With the PRI presiding over a mixed economy for much of the twentieth century, state enterprises, corporatism, and union leaders had become synonymous with corruption. This is how neoliberal discourse managed to appropriate the anti-corruption banner as part of its struggle against PRI statism and authoritarianism. The push for privatization and the crackdown on unionism — part and parcel of neoliberal processes worldwide — was viewed as essential for the country’s political opening, lending it a democratic legitimacy, at least temporarily. Proponents of privatization argued, among other things, that dismantling the web of corruption required eliminating the state’s relative monopoly over certain economic sectors; the free market would leave union leaders and administrators of state-owned companies without illegal sources of income. Pitched as the perfect companion to democratization, liberalization would free resources needed for an economic takeoff and produce a fairer distribution of wealth and income.
During the neoliberal period, the fight against corruption — beyond being a discretionary tool used for political attacks — entailed a view of corruption as synonymous with statism. For instance, in 1989, President Carlos Salinas de Gortari of the PRI orchestrated the famous quinazo — the arrest of Joaquín Hernández Galicia, “La Quina,” the Pemex union leader who had threatened to call a strike if the company was privatized. Hernández had enjoyed state protection during his nearly thirty years as union head, amassing significant wealth. Salinas, in what many observers noted as an attempt to legitimize his mandate after a fraudulent election, prosecuted him for tax evasion. La Quina was imprisoned and replaced by an equally dubious figure, Carlos Romero Deschamps. The teachers’ union leader, Carlos Jonguitud Barrios, was also pushed out (in favor of Elba Esther Gordillo, yet another dubious figure). The notion that corruption was the domain of union leaders from the country’s corporatist past began to take root.
Prosecuting known figures who used their connections to the state to extract special privileges emerged as a way for governing politicians to demonstrate their commitment to a just and transparent liberal order. It became commonplace for subsequent presidents to conduct quinazos — high-profile arrests of figures from the country’s corporatist past — at the beginning of their terms. In 1995, Ernesto Zedillo (PRI) jailed politician and businessman Raúl Salinas de Gortari (brother of the former president). Vicente Fox (PAN) initiated, but did not complete, proceedings against the new Pemex union leader, Romero Deschamps, in 2003, and forced the miners’ union leader, Napoleón Gómez Urrutia, into exile. Calderón (PAN) did not follow the practice precisely, but his closure of the state-owned regional electricity company, Luz y Fuerza del Centro, in 2009 carried similar rhetoric, linking anti-corruption efforts with de-statist processes. Peña Nieto (PRI) revived the tradition, imprisoning teachers’ union leader Gordillo in 2013.
However, in AMLO’s framing, it is precisely the neoliberal period that enabled corruption. Beginning in the 1990s, the state’s functions were outsourced to private companies and organizations, fostering backroom deals, competition for privileged access to government contracts, and the sale of state-owned enterprises. An overview of the most notorious corruption cases in recent decades corroborates this account.
Before the neoliberal period, corruption involved diverting public funds directly into the pockets of politicians. However, the restructuring of the state-market relationship that began in the 1990s led to a transfer of public funds to the private sector, though politicians still took their share. The aim was to not only buy off politicians and managers for opportunities to invest in a newly opened and deregulated economy but to carry out a full transfer of public goods. The sale of Telmex in 1990 to Carlos Slim, a close associate of then president Salinas de Gortari, serves as a prime example. These sorts of transactions turned state-owned entities into privately owned corporations, giving rise to an ultrawealthy class.
The PAN expanded the practice of guaranteeing business revenues via massive public transfers rather than privileged market opportunities. From 2000 to 2012, it entrenched overcharging in government service contracts. The independence bicentennial celebrations during Calderón’s administration is one notable example. The Estela de Luz, a hundred-meter-tall quartz monument, was inaugurated over a year late and cost three times its initial budget. A federal audit revealed overpriced construction materials and other irregularities. Although a dozen government officials were prosecuted for favoring the construction company Gutsa, they were only reprimanded for administrative offenses. A 2008 survey by Gallup International for Transparency International ranked Mexico second in the world for bribery, just behind Russia, with 38 percent of respondents citing frequent use of personal or family connections to obtain public contracts.4
With the PRI’s return to power in 2012, neoliberal corruption reached new depths. A photograph of Peña Nieto with nineteen governors on his inauguration day has become an infamous tally board — ten of them faced serious corruption charges. The most extreme and emblematic case was that of Javier Duarte de Ochoa, the former governor of Veracruz, who created over thirty shell companies to secure government contracts.
Two other scandals highlighting endemic neoliberal corruption in Mexico are the estafa maestra (Master Scam) and the Odebrecht case. The estafa maestra involved eleven federal agencies coordinating with public universities to evade budgetary oversight. Mexican law allowed government agencies, including universities, to obtain contracts without bidding, and these universities would then subcontract private entities to deliver the services. The scandal of the Brazilian construction company Odebrecht implicated Emilio Lozoya, then director of Pemex, who received bribes to secure contracts and support the 2013 energy reforms, which expanded private investment in the state oil company. The business class tapping into lucrative natural rents exemplifies the reverse-rentier strategy that replaced capital competition in open markets.
Despite public outrage over Peña Nieto’s scandals, anti-corruption efforts at the time focused on institutional redesign, most notably the 2015 constitutional reform creating the National Anti-Corruption System (SNA). Key proponents viewed corruption’s causes as “norms, procedures, and decision-making environments,” and hence advocated “redesigned institutional intelligence” to combat it.5 The SNA aimed to enhance coordination between local, state, and federal agencies to monitor public spending and contracts as well as introduce new auditing practices.
The SNA’s design was innovative: it was not a new government agency or autonomous constitutional body but a coordinating structure between government branches and autonomous entities. The Coordinating Committee (CC), comprising heads of the Superior Auditor, Ministry of Public Administration, Special Anti-Corruption Prosecutor, Federal Court of Administrative Justice, Federal Judicial Council, National Transparency Institute, and Citizen Participation Committee, would play a central role. The SNA also included a citizen participation committee (chaired by the CC president), an executive secretariat, a national digital platform, a national auditing system, local anti-corruption systems in each state, a specialized prosecutor’s office, and eighteen additional judges for the Federal Court of Administrative Justice.
Civil society organizations, led by the business sector, drove this anti-corruption reform process. Chambers of commerce and organizations like the Communication Council, the Voice of Business, and Mexicans Against Corruption and Impunity, led by business magnate Claudio X. González (now one of AMLO’s most prominent critics), played key roles. The Mexican Institute for Competitiveness, once led by Juan Pardinas, later the editorial director of the liberal right-wing newspaper Reforma, also participated.
López Obrador criticized the SNA from its inception. As early as 2016, AMLO called the SNA a “costly bureaucratic apparatus . . . which will only increase unnecessary, unproductive spending, waste, and simulation, pretending to fight corruption.” He reiterated this view as president in June 2020, criticizing the SNA as a farce. “Officials and so-called civil society [that support the SNA] . . . are just seeking positions in these organizations,” he warned. “This anti-corruption institute was to have regional offices, plus the central office. We’re talking about three hundred positions. Imagine how much that costs!” AMLO’s distrust of the SNA was clear, seeing it as a costly, cumbersome bureaucracy too compromised by private interests to be truly autonomous and effective against neoliberal corruption.6
In other words, in the ruling party’s view, the SNA did not address the root problem. Led by capitalists, these efforts could not tackle the systemic relationship between neoliberalism and corruption. Their focus on institutional redesign and recalibration ignored the need to alter the interaction between state and markets. Unable to understand the cases outlined above as more than independent crimes caused by deficient institutional norms, the SNA efforts misdiagnosed the political economic dimension of corruption.
AMLO’s linking of corruption and neoliberalism suggested that a solution required more than redesigning public institutions; it required fundamentally readjusting the state-market relation. It is quite telling, then, that the cancellation of the Texcoco Airport project that had started under Peña Nieto — AMLO’s quinazo (a dramatic intervention early in the presidency to assert authority) — differed from previous episodes in that it targeted a project symbolizing the systematic transfer of public resources to private contractors rather than an individual pre-neoliberal figurehead.
Another early intervention signaling the new government’s direction was the crackdown on huachicoleo, the theft and illegal sale of fuel from Pemex. The term has now even entered common parlance to describe various instances of public resource extraction. The operation has curbed the theft of fuel from state-owned pipelines, calculated at eighty-one thousand barrels daily, that involved a network of businessmen and organized crime.
In a more formal sense, the Financial Intelligence Unit (UIF) under the Finance Ministry, responsible for money laundering investigations, has become crucial to AMLO’s anti-corruption fight. Although established in 2004, the UIF had lain dormant. Under AMLO, the agency was charged with going after white-collar crime. Between 2019 and 2020, it froze thirty-one thousand bank accounts and over seven billion pesos, a record for the unit. It also cracked down on companies devoted to issuing false invoices, seizing accounts of over forty such companies in July 2020 and continuing investigations into hundreds more.7
Congress, controlled by Morena, also joined the effort with a reform classifying corruption as a serious crime. Concurrently, and counterintuitively, López Obrador has insisted on a punto final (point of closure) prioritizing the prevention of future corruption over punishing past offenses. This focus on corruption has yielded results: Mexico has improved its position in the corruption perception index by fourteen places, now ranking 124 out of 180 countries.
In addition, AMLO’s government combats generalized huachicoleo through “republican austerity.” Technically, this means reorganizing and recentralizing public spending by cutting from the top. The link between austerity and anti-corruption lies in identifying and eliminating public and private bureaucratic intermediaries distributing government resources to the general population. AMLO argues that these middlemen, with their opacities and redundancies, are key targets for potential budget capture and diversion. This rationale has led, for example, to eliminating the subcontracting public services (transferring resources to private organizations for managing services) to reintegrate them into centralized government institutions. Similarly, discretionary trust funds managing public monies have been eliminated to reintegrate them under state ministries’ control.
Critics of global neoliberalism like geographer David Harvey argue that neoliberalism should be understood less as an ideological stance on state-market separation and more as a political project of the ruling class to restore capital accumulation.8 The Keynesian period, post-1930s, was based on a social democratic consensus, which the global economic crisis of the early 1970s ended. The ruling class then sought to reverse previous gains through privatization and financial deregulation. Historian Robert Brenner notes that, since 1973, advanced capitalist economies have performed poorly, with slowed GDP growth, investment profits, and productivity. He identifies upward redistribution via politics as a way for the ruling class to reclaim capital accumulation through mechanisms such as tax cuts, low interest rates for government debt investment, and the privatization of public assets at discount prices while socializing massive losses by converting private debt into public debt, such as after the 2008 financial crisis.9 In wealthy countries, the state did not contract in a simple way; take, for example, Thomas Piketty’s finding that tax revenues in rich countries as a percentage of national income never dropped during the neoliberal period. What we have, arguably, is a retooling of the state to more closely reproduce the interests of capital.10 This in turn has given weight to some discussions about the ways neoliberalism extends but hides corruption. Wendy Brown, for example, points out that “neoliberal governance facilitates a more open-handed and effective fusion of political and economic power, one that largely eliminates the scandal of corruption as it erases differences in goals and governance between states and capital.”11
Although global liberalization proceeded along varied trajectories, this political economic description of neoliberalism fits the Mexican case particularly well. Neoliberalism in practice was not a simple state-market separation but an instrumentalization of the state for private profit. AMLO has insisted that this is the concrete form taken by post-developmentalist capitalism. For instance, in a February 2021 press conference, López Obrador argued, “In our country, capital accumulation didn’t necessarily arise from bourgeois exploitation of workers but from corruption. It intensified in the neoliberal period. . . . This isn’t dismissing Marxism but acknowledging that Mexico’s case is special.”12
Actually Existing Post-Neoliberalism, 2018–2024
López Obrador declared that his victory in the 2018 presidential elections marked the dawn of a new political regime rather than merely a change in government. Central to this purported transformation is a departure from the neoliberal economic policies that have been dominant in Mexico for decades. In March 2019, a few months into his term, AMLO announced the end of neoliberalism in the country: “The neoliberal model, with its policies against the people, of stealing and giving away [public resources], are hereby abolished.” This bold statement sparked a lively debate on the extent of this abolition and what, if anything, had replaced neoliberalism.
The transition away from neoliberalism under AMLO is moderate but significant. Rather than an outright rejection of the post-Keynesian order, AMLO’s policies can be described as post-neoliberal. Indeed, as William Davies and Nicholas Gane have put it:
With every year that passes, the number of apparently countervailing tendencies within and against neoliberalism is also growing. On the basis of a vastly improved understanding of what neoliberalism is, we can at least now agree that it is unlikely to terminate with any definitive paradigm-shifting crisis. In that sense, “post-neoliberalism” cannot refer to something that comes exclusively after neoliberalism, but rather — as with the notion of “post-Fordism” — to a set of emergent rationalities, critiques, movements and reforms that take root in neoliberal societies and begin to weaken or transform key tenets of neoliberal reason and politics.13
How has this process looked in AMLO’s Mexico? The term “post-neoliberalism” captures two key aspects of AMLO’s government: (1) the strategic adoption of elements of neoliberal discourse and policy to mitigate neoliberalism’s effects, and (2) the practical negotiation of an anti-neoliberal agenda forged when Morena was a social movement but tempered once it was in power by the realities of a nation transformed by neoliberalism in ways that could not be quickly or easily reversed. AMLO’s post-neoliberalism aims to reshape the relationship between state and market, specifically by relegitimizing the state as a social actor and a crucial instrument for national development, and to reignite class politics.
The Return of the State
The flagship concept of AMLO’s government is “republican austerity,” a strategic adoption of neoliberal discourse used to combat neoliberalism itself. As noted above, AMLO’s republican austerity aims to dismantle the network of intermediaries between the state and the citizenry in public resource distribution. These networks, which include clientelist brokers, NGOs, trusts (fideicomisos), and private companies contracted by the state, are viewed as opaque, redundant, and key bottlenecks for budgetary capture. Republican austerity should be distinguished from neoliberal austerity. Under AMLO, the “size” of the state, if judged by the number of federal government employees, has in fact grown slightly. Sectors such as science, education, and health have had their budgets increased, however minimally.14 Despite the economic crisis exacerbated by the COVID-19 pandemic, social spending as a percentage of total government expenditure in 2021 was the highest in a decade. AMLO’s social programs reach 65 percent more people than those of previous governments.15 Unlike past micro-targeted, means-tested social programs, AMLO’s cash-transfer programs adopt a universal, rights-based approach. These programs, now enshrined in the Constitution, target broad subgroups like the elderly, students, and persons with disabilities, with minimal conditions for access, reflecting a shift from focalized “handouts” to universal rights.
AMLO’s government has also rejected privatization efforts. There has been a push to recentralize government functions previously outsourced to private or semiprivate entities, reintegrating services into centralized government institutions. The elimination of opaque trusts managing public funds aims to reintegrate those funds into existing government ministries and under public oversight. State-led infrastructural megaprojects like the Felipe Ángeles Airport, the Dos Bocas refinery, the Maya Train, a transportation corridor on the Isthmus of Tehuantepec, rural road construction, and a reforestation program mark a departure from the neoliberal era. These projects emphasize the importance of generating public-works jobs, reflecting pre-neoliberal values.
The energy sector has received special attention under AMLO’s post-neoliberal logic. Efforts to revamp Pemex’s productive capacity aim to turn it into an engine of growth, though this is challenged by low oil prices and the imminent climate crisis. Additionally, AMLO has moderately curbed the power of foreign mining companies, pledging not to grant new concessions and reducing current concessioned territory by 21 percent after reviewing existing licenses.16 The recent push for a new hydrocarbons law further exemplifies this regulatory shift.
AMLO’s administration has taken decisive steps to bolster the public sector’s relative power, particularly in the energy industry. New legislation seeks to revoke permits for private companies that commit certain violations, aligning with the government’s vision of energy sovereignty. A new Electricity Industry Law, currently stuck in the courts, would reduce the existing requirement that the state-owned Federal Electricity Commission (CFE) purchase electricity from private companies, favoring CFE-generated electricity instead. These measures are intended to restore the public sector’s strength, which was diminished during the neoliberal period. However, these policies have led to a heated confrontation with green capital and environmentalists, highlighting the tensions between energy sovereignty and the fight against climate change.
Tax policy has also seen reform under AMLO. Despite managing macroeconomic variables conservatively, the administration has focused on increasing the state’s tax collection capacity, even amid the economic challenges of the pandemic. Mexico’s collection rates are below the OECD and Latin America and the Caribbean averages, so enhancing tax collection without changing the current tax structure effectively aims to mimic a progressive tax reform. According to official figures, the new government has increased tax collection from the wealthiest citizens by more than 200 percent.17 Additionally, efforts have been made to eliminate tax exemptions obtained through lobbying and legal maneuvers by large companies. Conglomerates like Grupo Modelo, Elektra, Walmart, and billionaire Carlos Slim’s companies are now under pressure to fulfill their tax obligations. The Financial Times described Raquel Buenrostro, then economic secretary, as an “iron lady” cracking a “whip on multinationals’ taxes.”18
The Return of Class Politics
The advancement of working-class interests in Mexico over the past six years is increasingly incontrovertible. Official figures reveal that real wages have surged by approximately 30 percent. Labor’s share of income has increased by 8 percentage points, marking the most significant rise after a prolonged period of stagnation. The earnings of the bottom 10 percent of income earners have soared by 98.8 percent. Additionally, the Gini coefficient has seen a decline, and overall poverty has dropped by 5 percent, amounting to over five million people lifted out of poverty — the largest reduction in twenty-two years. Unemployment rates are now the lowest in the region, coupled with a slight decrease in informal labor. There has also been a 109 percent increase in reparto de utilidades, the profit-sharing payments to which all workers are formally entitled but which employers could previously circumvent by outsourcing their hires. AMLO’s administration has achieved the lowest rate of the working poor, the most significant increase in the spending capacity of the poorest, and the highest taxes collected from the wealthiest in decades — all amid the challenges posed by a deadly pandemic and inflation.19
Historic increases to the minimum wage, legislative reforms facilitating unionization, more mandated vacation days, and the recognition of domestic workers’ labor rights have cemented support for AMLO’s project. Broad unconditional cash-transfer programs have bolstered this backing.
The process by which labor reform to facilitate unionization was achieved illustrates the post-neoliberal rather than anti-neoliberal direction of AMLO’s policies. The reform was part of the renegotiation of the North American Free Trade Agreement during Donald Trump’s presidency. While Canadian delegations, influenced by their own unions, had long pressed for labor rights clauses, previous Mexican delegations resisted, arguing that Mexico’s competitive edge relied on low labor costs. However, in late 2018, the outgoing Peña Nieto administration allowed president-elect López Obrador to assign attachés to the delegation negotiating the new United States–Mexico–Canada Agreement. Although the opportunity to revise the agreement was undoubtedly instigated by North American politicians and unions, AMLO could have adopted a class-neutral approach. Instead he used the opportunity to advance Mexican labor rights, supporting labor rights clauses in exchange for securing the new trade deal and gaining the support of powerful economic groups within Mexico.20
The reemergence of class-based political discourse and agitation under AMLO represents a significant break from the past. Neoliberalism promoted a language that pitted a loosely defined “civil society” against the state, which in turn conceded the need for greater citizen control over governance. This discourse sidelined class politics. AMLO’s administration, however, is restoring the language of class to the political arena. In a deep sense, the so-called democratic transition, with its conceptions of civil society and citizen and its understanding of politics as the search for technocratic fixes as opposed to the negotiation between social sectors with structurally defined interests, was an ideological cover for the advancement of the interests of the upper classes.
The electorate has become increasingly polarized along clear class lines. In the 2018 election, working-class support was dispersed across various parties, including those in the neoliberal bloc, while AMLO had significant support from middle-class professionals. However, the 2021 midterm elections signaled a reconfiguration of the electoral base. Exit polls by El Financiero showed a shift: in 2018, 48 percent of college-educated voters supported Morena’s congressional candidates, compared to only 33 percent in 2021. Conversely, support from voters with only elementary education rose from 42 percent in 2018 to 55 percent in 2021.21 Recent polling from Mitofsky reveals that AMLO’s strongest support comes from employees, the informal sector, and peasants, while his biggest detractors are the business sector and college-educated professionals.22 Business leaders, such as tycoon Claudio X. González and former Coparmex head Gustavo de Hoyos, now openly organize against AMLO’s policies. Without formal party ties, these leaders finance campaigns, draft talking points, and set conditions for party coalitions.
The loss of middle-class people’s support for AMLO is partly due to their symbolic demotion in his narrative. While previous administrations valued a cabinets of experts trained at elite universities, AMLO criticizes such technocratic expertise as political marketing, instead praising administrators for their closeness to the people. Additionally, socially liberal circles criticize AMLO for not advancing same-sex marriage rights or abortion freedom and instead preferring to settle these issues with referendums. However, significant progress has been made at the state level where Morena controls state legislatures. AMLO’s pragmatic alliance with the conservative Solidarity Encounter Party in 2018 and his response to the feminist movement’s demands, which he has often viewed as attacks orchestrated by the Right, further complicate his relationship with disproportionately socially liberal middle-class and professional supporters.
Exit polls from the 2024 presidential elections that Sheinbaum won give a better sense of the phenomenon. El País showed Sheinbaum winning 66 percent of those with elementary-level education and 65 percent of the lowest income bracket, but only 43 percent of those with college-level education and 50 percent of the top income bracket. Similar results from El Financiero indicate 74 percent support from voters with elementary education and 71 percent from the lowest income bracket, but only 48 percent from college-educated voters and 49 percent from the top income bracket. Parametría shows a similar 20 point spread between the lowest and highest income groups, with 65 percent support from elementary-educated voters but only 17 percent from those with advanced degrees. Per El País, Sheinbaum’s highest support, around 60 percent, comes from private-sector employees, peasants, teachers, the self-employed, and housewives, while the lowest support is among professionals (46 percent) and employers (39 percent). Local analyses reveal disproportionate support for Morena in historically marginalized southern states, where the economy grew 6.1 percent in 2023, double the national average. The Right’s strength, in contrast, is found in the richest neighborhoods of the country’s largest metropolitan centers and many state capitals. In sum, the return to class politics extends beyond Mexico’s polarized national discourse. It is also reflected in the stark political realignment underway. After six years of policies benefiting workers and the poor, Morena seems poised to continue its efforts at installing a reformed, post-neoliberal regime.23
Limits, Dilemmas, and Contradictions of the Left in Power
The neoliberal period in Mexico, as elsewhere, severely disarticulated the working classes. This disarticulation was not merely due to attacks on unions but also to deep changes in class composition toward increased precarity and informal labor, in which 40 to 60 percent of the Mexican workforce engages.24 This condition has hampered the working classes from generating their own demands and elevating them to the political sphere, leading to a lack of organized pressure from below to push the government leftward.
AMLO’s administration took over after a prolonged period of hollowing out the state, which impaired the actual implementation of new government plans. There has been a concerted effort to recentralize government functions, but without restoring substantial state capacity, we can expect continued dependence on public-private partnerships and an increased reliance on the military’s administrative apparatus to build and operate many infrastructure projects.
The need to recover state power is also evident in the persistence of severe cartel violence. This issue prompted AMLO to create a new National Guard, composed of army members and new recruits retrained to perform police work. Critics claim this represents the militarization of public life. While this may be the case, AMLO’s reliance on the military appears to be an attempt at substituting weakened state institutions with a centralized public apparatus that preserves real capacity.
Finally, AMLO’s anti-corruption effort paradoxically reveals both a limit and a condition of possibility for the deepening of the cuarta transformación. On the one hand, it contains a left wing that argues for the indispensability of progressive tax reform in the country. On the other hand, it offers a condition of possibility for an expanded post-neoliberal welfare state in the future, with the state having regained its social legitimacy and shifted toward universalist principles.
López Obrador’s development strategy largely hinged on the argument that sufficient resources existed for megaprojects and ambitious social programs without the need to resort to tax increases. Thus, his administration’s development plan and social spending depended on significantly reducing corruption at the highest echelons of the business-state nexus. As he wrote in a letter to the business sector during the 2018 electoral campaign:
We believe that without corruption and with an austere government, we can lift Mexico out of economic crisis, unrest, poverty, and the spiral of insecurity and violence it currently suffers. To achieve this, no tax increases or state debt will be necessary; honesty in government and reducing administrative costs will suffice to increase public investment and use it as seed capital for productive projects involving private and social sector participation.25
In other words, López Obrador’s anti-corruption stance also argues against the need for progressive tax reform. This presents an interesting paradox: while his project champions the state’s redistributive role — uniquely linking economic redistribution with combating neoliberal corruption — it also restrains a faction of the Left advocating for higher taxes on the wealthy.
This paradox only deepens given the electoral left’s ambitions to advance reform in a context where the state’s legitimacy has been eroded for decades. The political viability of an agenda of higher taxes is already uncertain, and Morena’s reliance on austerity may compound the uncertainty. Currently, the popularity of such a demand and the potential coalition supporting it are unclear, even if tax increases only target the wealthy. The reason for this is widespread public distrust regarding the use of public resources. Nevertheless, Morena’s success in fighting corruption and recuperating social resources for the popular good could play a key role in future fiscal policy discussions. Continued success could challenge the argument that politicians steal everything — thus serving as a condition of possibility for a more robust post-neoliberal state.
Conclusion
In this text I outlined three dimensions that help us understand the success of the electoral left in contemporary Mexico. I argued, first, that the distinctive feature, comparatively and historically, of AMLO’s project is his progressive reframing of anti-corruption politics; second, that this feature is premised on a diagnosis of corruption as a specific political economy; and finally, that AMLO’s tenure is better understood as post-neoliberal rather than anti-neoliberal.
Any analysis of AMLO’s success must also grapple with the dilemmas inherent in transitioning away from neoliberalism, many only mentioned here in passing. These include attempting to revive a welfare state with a deteriorated administrative apparatus, the contradictions of neo-developmentalist projects amid the looming climate crisis, the complexities of implementing progressive taxation during periods of stagnant growth, and the challenges of shifting away from a foreign investment–driven growth model. Consequently, the story of the Left in twenty-first-century Mexico holds broad relevance, as these structural contradictions mirror the dilemmas faced by the contemporary left worldwide.
In recent years, interest has grown about what neoliberalism is or was in practice as opposed to in theory. That is, the question of actually existing neoliberalism has now come to the forefront, accompanied by a series of inquiries into whether neoliberalism across the world differed in practice from neoliberalism in the Western core, whether it is accurate to say that the state really contracted during the period or if it was actually retooled in new and specific ways, and whether market and state were really separated or merged even more than during the Keynesian period. Was it protectionism for the West and free trade for the rest? Should we be thinking of neoliberalisms in the plural rather than in a monolithic sense? That this set of questions emerges more clearly just when a variety of post-neoliberal regimes begin to take shape is perhaps no contradiction, since “the owl of Minerva takes flight only at dusk.” The Mexican case should be at the forefront of these political-intellectual efforts. 
