The transcript of this episode can be accessed by clicking the “Transcript” button below the title. All other episodes are here.
Luke talks with Lic. Alfredo Villalpando, a student of Mexican political life, and Dr. Sami Tapio Tenoch Laaksonen, a political activist and journalist. Sami’s journalism can be found online. Alfredo and Sami examine the political landscape in Mexico, the rise of Morena, the party’s success and challenges, Claudia Sheinbaum’s response to Donald Trump, and recent changes to the Mexican Constitution. Last June, I also talked with José Luis Granados Ceja and Kurt Hackbarth about Mexican politics and Andrés Manuel López Obrador's plan to change Mexico's Supreme Court. Additional articles on Mexico are here, here, and here.
This episode is in Spanish. An abridged translation in English is below.
Luke: Hello everyone and welcome to another episode of the Democratic Constitution Blog. I'm talking to Sammy and Alfredo about the political situation in Mexico, including subjects like Morena and changes to the Mexican Constitution. First, tell us about your background and political experiences.
Sami: Thanks for the invitation. My political activism started when I was 16. I showed up at a meeting of the Finnish Communist Party because I was born in Finland. I was also active in the animal rights movement. I was involved in other political organizations in Finland, including one called Left Alliances. Later, I was a local deputy and took on other jobs in local government and the regional parliament. I’ve been involved with Morena in Mexico since 2005. I participated in the March of Silence with Andrés Manuel López Obrador in 2005. I and several other participants, including his children, were asked to form a circle of protection around him. I spent an hour by his side. That act broke the law against foreigners participating in political activity because I didn’t become a citizen until 2012. Since then I have been a Morena sympathizer. Now, I work for Morena as a coordinator in La Condesa and Hipódromo. I also worked in Claudia Sheinbaum and Clara Abrugada’s campaign [Clara is the head of government of Mexico City]. Alfredo and I met through Morena’s Instituto Nacional de Formación Política.
Alfredo: Thanks, Luke, for the invitation. The work you are doing is very important. I hope this is only the first of a long series of programs in Spanish. This is an important language, not only in Mexico but also in the U.S. and wherever Spanish is spoken. My political activism began when I was 19 and participated in various campaigns in the state of Aguascalientes. Later, I worked in congress and the national assembly at the state level. I then had a long career in the National Electoral Institute. I was practically the founder of the Federal Electoral Institute, which was what the NEI was first called in 1990. The NEI is the body in charge of organizing elections in Mexico. Later, I spent a period in the Senate of the Republic. Now, we are very interested in this movement of national transformation.
Luke: What is Morena for both of you? What are some important dates?
Sami: There are many ways to talk about Morena. but I’ll start with the name: “Movement of National Regeneration.” The name explains the concept, no? Between 1982 and 2018, Mexico lived the “night of neoliberalism.” Rights were ended and privatization, corruption, and violence were prevalent. “Regeneration,” then, means regenerating the nation. López Obrador always cited Ricardo Flores Magón: “Only the people [pueblo] can save the people.” The antecedents of Morena are all of the earlier political movements, including Independence [1810-1821], Reform [1854-1876], and Revolution [1911-17]. In 1908, Ricardo Flores Magón, his brothers, and other supporters of the Liberal Party launched their program. This program was an initial inspiration for Morena. But of course, Morena also comes from the student movement of 1968, including all of the people who followed that road, who suffered and were deprived of human rights, and had their families disappeared. Another antecedent was the electoral fraud of 1988 and neoliberalism pushed by Carlos Salinas de Gortari and other bad presidents. The PRD (Party of the Democratic Revolution) emerged from these events, and this movement lasted until around 2012 and the presidency of Enrique Peña Nieto. The left then lost much of its revolutionary essence. Morena became a registered party in 2014. It has been a long road. López Obrador won the presidency in 2018 after suffering a defeat via fraud in 2006 and maybe in 2012. Many elections had irregularities.
I focus a lot on the electoral aspect. Another aspect of Morena is its values and principles. “For the good of all, first the poor.” “With the people everything; without the people, nothing.” “You can’t have a rich government when the people are poor.” A lot of this comes from Mexico’s history. As López Obrador often said, the greatness of Mexico is sustained by two pillars: one is the country’s political history and the other is its cultural history, especially its indigenous history. All of this has been taken up by Morena and has given the people of Mexico a new common sense.
Alfredo: For me, Morena is the end and the beginning. It’s the end of a grand and long struggle that lasted many decades in this country in which “democracy” was only a word that filled the mouths of politicians and true democracy was rare. The Left’s struggle in Mexico, as in most of the American continent, has been full of defeats, betrayals, death, suffering, and blood. Only in 2018 did a government finally arrive that comes close to the definition of “left” as it was taught to us in school. Morena is the end of a great struggle that cost a lot. However, it’s also the beginning of another movement because Morena is in power. For the first time, Mexico has a leftist government — a fact that’s magnified by the past 30 years of neoliberal governments from the arrival of Miguel de la Madrid in 1982 to the departure of Peña Nieto in 2018. All of these governments, the PRI and the PAN, followed the same line of neoliberalism. For all of these years, the PRI was a chameleon-like party. Back then, there could still be presidents with a right-wing vision.
The Left’s arrival to power in 2018 is very important, especially because Mexico has something that no other country has: A 3,000-kilometer border with the U.S. Therefore, none of this is easy. Morena is a party that in less than 6 or 8 years has not only the presidency but a majority in both houses [the Cámara de Diputados and the Cámara de Senadores] — that’s to say, a majority in Congress. It also has a majority in more than 17 state congresses and a majority of state governorships. This is no small thing because the challenges facing Morena are enormous — as enormous as the fight the Mexican Left has been waging for decades.
Sami: Proximity to the people also characterizes Morena. I don’t like to talk about populism because it’s like saying “The fools are being fooled.” It’s a bit like what Trump is doing in the U.S. It’s easier to fool people than to serve them. Morena is serving people, not fooling them. Many good things began when Morena started going house-to-house, which we are still doing (and suffering a lot in the sun when people don’t open their doors). Claudia came from all of this work, too. Claudia went door-to-door and López Obrador went town-to-town. I saw all of this for myself in 2013 in Juchitán de Zaragoza while doing my doctoral thesis. I remember how Morena began, from nothing. And now it has grown immensely.
Another point is about Morena as a party-movement. Morena is not a typical Mexican political party. Morena isn’t tribal. It’s free of internal conflict. It has a lot of unity, organization, and mobilization. But the most important point is not to lose the “movement” part. We are always with the people, always active. Yes, Morena has won elections, but it is not only an electoral structure that wins elections. The PRI has always won elections. Morena is qualitatively different.
Luke: I came to Mexico a month before Sheinbaum's victory and it was evident that she would win by a landslide. This struck me as strange coming from the U.S. where the popularity vote is often very close. How did Morena get to this position of so much power, and, I think, more importantly, a lot of popularity and legitimacy?
Alfredo: What happens is that in the U.S., unfortunately for you all, the elections are getting closer and closer, and that's not just a trend in the U.S. We just saw last Sunday's elections in Ecuador, where the difference between the ruling party and the opposition is not even one point. In Mexico, it was different because there was a true “fiesta” of corruption in the last decades that made people tired. That added to the emergence of an extremely charismatic candidate and popular candidate [López Obrador] who had called into question the electoral results in three previous elections. In the case of Sheinbaum, she faced extremely mediocre opposition. Therefore, the people [el pueblo] demonstrated again what Obrador had said: the people understand. The opposition always made fun of that phrase, but the reality is that finally the people got fed up after so many years of a regime that only changed faces while remaining the same.
In 2000, Vincent Fox became president after 70 consecutive years of PRI rule. People voted overwhelmingly for him. However, no more than a year passed before people realized that this change was “gatopardismo,” or, “letting everything change so that nothing changes.” Voters could have widely rejected López Obrador in 2018 but didn’t. They returned in 2024 to elect Claudia Sheinbaum but with an even larger margin than Obrador. It’s a phenomenon that has rarely occurred in recent years in democratic countries.
Sami: I’ll focus on two themes: project and results. I agree with what Alfredo said. In addition, Morena is a party of results, which Claudia included in her campaign slogan: “Love for the people, honesty with results.” These are two key points. The other important part is the project. López Obrador had been working with his team (because he had a great team, too) for twelve years to win the presidency. These plans worked. In terms of economic figures, Mexico is doing well. It has the lowest unemployment rate of any OECD country. The country has seen growth in the stock market and in terms of formal employment. Other countries are also investing in Mexico. Also, this has come about while thinking about the people who need the most: “For the good of all, first the poor.” If you serve those who have less, they will be able to consume, they will be able to reactivate the internal market, and they will encourage money to flow from the bottom up. Neoliberalism caused all kinds of problems that led to migration, lack of opportunities, abandonment of the youth, and increased violence (including drug trafficking violence). In contrast, the model of the 4th Transformation (4T) attends to the causes of social problems.
We can think about three parallel concepts: Morena, the 4th Transformation of public life in Mexico, and “Obradorismo.” All three concepts work together to form a movement. Obrador was the project. He arrived thanks to the people and the people ruled through him. Now that he is gone, the people have to maintain that legacy and continue to govern. Obrador was the leader in many ways, the leader of these ideas, perhaps in a way that has only been seen in Lazaro Cardenas [1934-40]. Morena has also changed how candidates are elected. Before, the president would name his successor. This time, there were four Morena candidates and one Green Party candidate who competed. There was internal debate about who would represent Morena in the elections. If Morena had been divided during this process, it would have fallen. Instead, it managed to strengthen itself in a difficult process.
Aldrefo: Luke, you said that when you arrived in Mexico it was obvious that the Morena candidate was going to win by a wide margin. One would have to be an expert to understand all of the reasons why this was the case. But one reason is that many people were accustomed for many decades to not having promises fulfilled and for the first time, a government was doing things that the government of the PRI and PAN (PRIAN) said were impossible. The PRIAN said it was impossible to raise the minimum wage, to have social programs, to have social rights, to have a welfare state. There are things in Mexico now that are hard to imagine in the U.S., such as the fact that the president gives a press conference every day of the week for an hour and a half. All of the manti-morena media made fun of the morning press conferences, but now the conferences are a model of communication that’s being studied all over the world. All of these details led people to vote for Morena in 2024 by a 2-1 margin.
Sami: To put that in the context of the U.S., Sheinbaum would have received over 400 Electoral College votes. Xóchitl Gálvez only won the state of Aguascalientes. But yes, the model of communication is very important. This has meant that the government can communicate directly with the people and allows the people to participate in all aspects of political change. And that is awareness, right? Obrador’s victory was an anti-like process in some way, literally going house by house. Obrador and his team went house to house giving out his magazine. They used social media to spread their message and won a lot of terrain this way. The method of communication imposed from above was challenged by Morena, by communication from below. And I also feel part of the process because I have been doing journalism for more than 15 years.
Luke: You are both right that a lot of things are strange and difficult to understand from my U.S. perspective. For example, the recent changes to the Mexican Constitution and the general discourse around the Constitution. What is the discourse around the Constitution like in Mexico?
Alfredo: Well, in the case of Mexico it is precisely one of the great changes that have occurred in the past administration of López Obrador and so far under President Sheinbaum. Mexico has been a country of many laws, but they have not always been respected. The current Constitution has practically no more than a few paragraphs of the original Constitution that was signed in 1917 in the city of Querétaro. Now we are seeing Constitutional changes that have affected large parts of the population for the better, especially the poorest sections. For example, in the case of President López Obrador, welfare pensions were elevated to constitutional status, which is something very, very important for the majority of Mexicans because of our high rates of poverty. This type of constitutional change is hard to reverse, which is important. For many older adults, a pension is the difference between eating or not eating, and between buying or not buying medicine. Therefore, the expansion of welfare pensions has been one of the most important constitutional changes. It was also important to reverse Peña Nieto's energy reform, which was a reform that sought to completely privatize the Mexican oil company and the Federal Electricity Commission company, which are companies of the Mexican State but which the neoliberal governments had been privatizing little by little and handing them over to Spanish companies or companies from the U.S. for the purpose merely of doing business. These types of reforms — where the nation is protected, where your land is protected, and the assets that exist are protected — are important and were unthinkable for the neoliberal governments.
President Sheinbaum also entered with the banner of what was called Plan C, which is the constitutional reform that makes the ministers of the Supreme Court of Justice of the Nation elected by popular vote, along with other federal judges and magistrates. That is unprecedented. No country in the world elects its judiciary as is going to be done in Mexico. In the U.S., there are some states where there is the election of certain judges, but choosing the Supreme Court justices is totally unprecedented. All of these constitutional changes made in less than seven years of transformation governments have stopped the neoliberal change that had Mexico on sale for cheap. We now have a government that is making constitutional reforms in favor of the people and no longer in favor only of the rich, which was the official discourse until 2018.
Luke: Yes, I find it all very, very interesting, especially these changes to the Supreme Court and the system of judges. Exactly to your point, it seems like an impossible change in the U.S.
Alfredo: This is a change that has caused enormous controversy because one of the pillars of corruption in Mexico was precisely the judicial power. The judiciary does not have the reputation of being either the quickest, the most expeditious, the cleanest, or the most just. A country cannot advance if it has judges that are bought by the highest bidder.
Sami: Surely this is a problem that also happens in the U.S. There are corporate interests that intervene in the actions of judges. What’s curious is that this isn’t the first time that Mexico has been an example to the rest of the world. In 1917, the Mexican Constitution predated that of the Union Soviet and the Russian Revolution. It was the first modern social constitution that granted many labor, land, education, and health rights. It was very pioneering at the time. López Obrador in some way returned to that, and the entire movement has returned to that same current of thought, of returning to the constitution’s original character: social and fair. But Mexico has also been a country where there are many laws, but they are not followed. It’s not only the letter of the law but also the practice. López Obrador made 26 constitutional changes and Claudia has already made 16 in practically four months. There have been reforms in security, substantive equality, and labor rights (for example the reform of Infonavit, which is the National Housing Fund for Workers. There was a lot of corruption there). Certain autonomous institutes have also been removed since sometimes rights were granted to institutes that no one monitored and there was a lot of corruption.
Luke: I’m interested in the Constitution’s role. In the U.S., the Constitution is very important and there are constant references to whether an action is in accordance with the Constitution. It is a very active part of political life in the U.S. Is this the case in Mexico?
Alfredo: In Mexico, the Constitution has a new meaning. Since the time of the laws of the conquest [la conquista], we have the idea that a law can be obeyed but not complied with. This is the origin of a situation where there are many laws, as Sammy said, but not all of them are followed. Today, the social character is being returned to the Constitution. Most importantly, I think, is that the new generations — the people who are now studying in secondary school, high school, university, the recent graduates — are realizing that another Mexico is possible and that to have that other Mexico it’s necessary to have a scaffolding, a well-structured legal foundation. The Constitution is a tree that has many branches. It must be a strong tree, a healthy tree, and not simply be a pretext to say we have a law but it is just there, we do not comply with it, we are not interested. Anyone can buy that law with money. I believe that this foundation is being created during this “second floor” of the Fourth Transformation. First, the house was cleaned. Now we are going to lay those foundations so that this country can be what it should be, a medium-term power, which is what I believe Mexico has deserved for many years.
Sami: I think we see it in three complementary areas. There is a declaration of principles, which is the Constitution. There it’s said that people think as a nation and what must be achieved. The objectives are set. Then there are secondary laws, which are perhaps the closest to citizens and daily life. The third level is the institutional level. If the institutions do not work, the laws are not applied. We are currently moving forward in all three of these areas. We have to carry out these laws and also collaborate more with citizens, which is perhaps a fourth level: participation. Hence the importance of participatory democracy. And for that participatory democracy helps a lot.
How does this compare to the U.S.? Well, the U.S. in many cases is an archaic country in its design. It is a democracy that has not changed a single letter [of its Constitution] in many years. The U.S. is not an example of direct democracy and it has not developed much participatory democracy. The same thing happens with the constitution, where each president imposes his judges who follow various interests. It is practically impossible to change the laws. For example, the handling of weapons, which is urgent. Or anything in terms of public health to address this phenomenon of fentanyl and other drugs. Now Trump, with an executive order, wants to change birthright citizenship — a basic human right. The executive model is very strange, isn't it? It’s possible for one person to change everything without consulting Congress.
Luke: To finish, I would like to ask you about Mexico's response to Trump.
Alfredo: Returning to what we mentioned a few minutes ago about why Morena won again, why Claudia Sheinbaum won again, is because López Obrador returned national dignity to Mexicans. Mexicans are a people who have always felt humiliated, they have always felt lesser compared to other powers, not to mention the U.S. But López Obrador showed that if the country had not advanced as it should, it was because we’d had a very long series of bad governments. López Obrador was one of the few presidents who was able to tame that unmentionable Trump. He was able to negotiate well, and unlike other presidents, he didn't come away bruised or scraped. But that was during López Obrador's time. In the current time of Sheinbaum, Well, we just have to take a look at the way Presidents like the Argentine Milley treat Trump, or the Prime Minister of Canada, Justin Trudeau, and see the solid response that Sheinbaum had towards him.
I can't imagine what it must feel like to be Argentine and have a president who is going to dance to Mar-a-Lago, to Trump, or a prime minister like Trudeau who does the same. I believe that the position that Sheinbaum has had towards Trump has been a solid position and a position that has been recognized by countries and presidents in many parts of the world. I believe that she has been very political, she has shown to have a cool head, she has not been emotional and she has given herself respect. And by giving herself respect, she gives respect to the country as well. What is going to happen? We don't know what will happen because Trump is the clearest symbol of the real-time decay that we are seeing in the U.S. I believe that one of the greatest challenges that the administration in the U.S. will have is dealing with a person who is shown above all to be unstable and dangerous. But I think that if President Sheinbaum continues on the line she has been setting — the way she's treated Trump — I think we're going to be O.K. I have no doubt.
Sami: We have unity and intelligence. We have pride in being Mexicans and we have unity. Claudia has a lot of support, around 80%. We have the intelligence of an academic woman who has seen worse politicians than Trump right here in Mexico. Here we have had many dogs that bark but do not die. So, for Claudia, Trump is just another dog. She does not fall for his provocations. López Obrador did the same thing. He didn't fall into Trump's game of talking about the border wall. He talked about concrete issues that could be done. Claudia, with her cool head, is already a worldwide example of resistance to Trump, as Schultz named her in Germany, or said the Wall Street Journal. Trump tries to generate fear, xenophobia, and racism. His is a politics of fear.
Luke: Thank you both!
Alfredo: Thank you Luke for the invitation, and we hope that the people who listen to the podcast, most of all people in the U.S., don’t lose hope. I’d like to say to the people of the U.S. that the fight is only beginning. Half of the country chose the right way, but the other half didn’t. I think the half that chose Trump will soon learn they were wrong. This is what happened to us in Mexico. There’s light at the end of the tunnel.
Sami: I would also close with a message of certain optimism because that is the good thing about having someone as bad as Trump: he does things wrong without thinking. He can unite everyone who hates the Democratic Party and everyone who hates the Republican Party. He can generate a grand movement in support of rights and the creation of a more just U.S.
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