Left Turn Ahead

Mexico’s new president does not have any messianic illusions to change the world like Hugo Chavez or aspiration to become a regional and global leader, as Lula of Brazil tried. His focus is on domestic issues.

- R. Viswanathan

THE LANDSLIDE VICTORY of Andres Manuel Lopez Obrador (Amlo) in the presidential elections held on July 1 is the beginning of a new chapter in the modern political history of  Mexico. This is the first time a radical leftist outsider has become the president of the country, which had been under a one-party dictatorship of the Institutional Revolutionary Party (PRI) for 77 years, and a two-term reign of the centre-right National Action Party (PAN) from 2000 to 2012. Amlo trounced both the mainstream parties as the candidate of MORENA (Movement for National Regeneration, a new political party he created four years ago) in alliance with a few other minor parties. He got 53.4 per cent of the votes while his party and its partners secured an absolute majority in both houses of the Congress, besides winning several state governorships and municipal mayor posts. The voters have given a clear mandate for Amlo’s leftist agenda, which promised profound transformation.

The sweeping win would have made M.N. Roy, one of the cofounders of the Communist party of India and the Mexican Communist Party, proud. During his stay in Mexico from 1917 to 1921, Roy was involved in Mexican politics and was an active member of the Mexican Socialist Party. He wrote articles in El Socialista and was a director of the newspaper. Later, he got converted to Marxism and cofounded the Mexican Communist Party in 1919. He had represented Mexico at the Third Congress of the Communist International held in Moscow in 1920. The Mexican government had given a diplomatic passport to Roy with a Mexican name to facilitate his secret travel to Moscow.