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MEXICO CITY — Early on almost every weekday over the past six years a master class in modern political messaging and manipulation is put on in the Mexican presidential palace.
“Good morning!” yells out President Andrés Manuel López Obrador, walking across the stage up to the lectern. The audience — all journalists, on paper at least — yells a few good mornings back and stays seated for the Mexican head of state. It’s not like the White House press room on the rare times the president ventures out. Things are tamer here. It’s 7:17 a.m. Coffee isn’t provided.
This is the mañanera: a talk and variety program formally called a presidential press conference that runs over two or three hours and sets the daily tone for political life in America’s southern neighbor.
It’s a big reason why Mexico’s president is arguably the world’s most successful politician — if one were to judge by his high approval ratings in the 60s and up and unchallenged dominance weeks before his constitutionally mandated single term winds down after elections on June 2.
López Obrador shares many traits with other populist leaders. He’s a nationalist and a bruiser in the mold of India’s Narendra Modi, Hungary’s Viktor Orban or Donald Trump — here some call the GOP standard-bearer “America’s AMLO.” He attacks the media, nurses grievances that are deeply local yet feel familiar to an outsider, picks at institutional foundations like independent courts, and constantly pits “the people” against the “corrupt” establishment. He’s pragmatic on policy, like them too, and plays up his “wins,” sometimes facts be damned. Unlike them, López Obrador is a “man of the left,” which brings home that style and performance on stage — rather than ideological consistency or actual job performance — are the keys to success in our age of politics as spectacle.
He hasn’t gotten as much attention outside his country as his predecessors or other major leaders do, and doesn’t seek it. But in important ways, the Mexican president’s approach is revealing of what works in 21st century politics.
Yes, he is a familiar Latin American type. A line goes from Fidel Castro to Hugo Chávez to him: TV cameras liked them all, and they claimed to have a genuine connection with the forgotten men and women of their country — in López Obrador’s case, with the legitimacy of a landslide election win and massive support. That qualifier is important. American politics resemble Mexico’s not because we’re both becoming banana republics, but because López Obrador is good at what matters now, as is Donald Trump. He has personalized the highly institutionalized office of the president and broken the hold of long-established parties. That isn’t a right or left thing either. Emmanuel Macron, no member of the Populist International, pulled off a similar feat when he broke up France’s party system to romp to the French presidency before the age of 40.
Also strikingly, López Obrador has brought the public with him. Even as he has loud detractors, Mexico isn’t “polarized” the way the U.S. and major European democracies are. He has done that by filling the public space — and crowding others out — with a mix of bombast, charm and an ability to connect with voters directly. Trump lost his last election because he overdid the first and lacked the second, but he’s also leading polls because at least he’s driving the conversation. Joe Biden’s problem is that while his legislative record may be impressive, as a figure he’s small on our screens and therefore in our minds. Who was the last president to fill as little space in American public life — maybe George H.W. Bush?
At themañanera last Thursday, 16 days before AMLO’s handpicked successor Claudia Sheinbaum will almost certainly win the election, the president wants to talk about electricity. Mexico had power outages the previous week. Seven men in suits who run the various bodies of government that oversee the power grid follow him onto the stage.
Sound boring? Wait.
They are here,López Obradorsays,“to inform, inform, inform.” The television screen next to him lights up with a picture of a front page of the newspaper Reforma (“a filthy pamphlet of conservatism,” AMLO narrates) then a montage of prominent journalists talking about the blackouts — with ominous music as a soundtrack. The unsubtle point: The media is, in his words, “at the service” of oligarchical powers, and it exaggerates and lies. “That is their job,” he says, “alarmism and opposing everything our government does.”
López Obrador notes that television anchors make “five times more” than him. AMLO talks about money all the time, like Trump. He’s ostentatious about his austere life — AMLO’s famous for wearing scuffed shoes — the same way that Trump is ostentatious about being wealthy. Both connect with people that way.
The press can’t help itself, López Obrador says almost with pity, they aren’t “technical experts.” The seven electricity officials are called up to the podium and speak one after the other for an hour. Charts and maps pop up. The government is handling this well, they all say.
When the president comes back up, he replays the top of that press-bashing video and quotes Nazi propagandist Joseph Goebbels about having to repeat a lie to make it true. “They think that that way they will manipulate [the people],” he says. “They” is the media, rich people (“fifis,” he calls them), the political establishment, Americans of course. They stole his first “victory” in 2006, when AMLO lost the election to Felipe Calderón, in a vote that he has never acknowledged as legitimate. A former mayor of Mexico City and self-declared outsider, though he began in politics decades ago with the then ruling party, he lost again in 2012 before winning in 2018. López Obradorenjoys nursing his grievances over an allegedly unfair election — a “political lynching,” he calls it. “No president has been attacked as much as I have.” There’s a guy north of the border who’d disagree and at the same time admire the method; people close to them say they get along. (“Trump is a tough guy,” says AMLO’s former foreign minister Marcelo Ebrard. “He built good relations with President López Obrador, who is also a tough guy.”)
The journalists are props in this live broadcast. A couple are called on. The first is Sandra Aguilar, a pleasant lady who, I later learn, runs a one-person media website. She asks two questions that couldn’t be softer. I raise my hand repeatedly, as do others; AMLO doesn’t call on anyone else. We get a jab at a U.S. military commander who claimed that “70 percent of Mexico” is controlled by the narcos. AMLO says he set him straight. Violence in a southern state comes up and AMLO calls up several ready charts of crime statistics, all favorable to his administration. He takes a dig at the highest court whose judges he wants to rotate out — one of the reasons why opponents consider him a threat to Mexican democracy. He touts Mexico’s low national debt and unemployment. There’s more media commentary. The New York Times gets dinged twice. And so on, until he wraps up around 10.
“I offer my apologies,” he says toward the end, “because I repeat myself a lot. But it’s my job.”
Goebbels isn’t mentioned again.
