Candidate List Finalized for Mexico's 2018 Presidential Election

Campaigning begins on March 30

Leading in the Polls:  Andrés Manuel López Obrador (MORENA) Will Launch His Presidential Campaign in Juárez

So far the consistent front-runner for President in the 2018 Mexican elections is Andrés Manuel López Obrador, 64 years old, better known in Mexico as AMLO.  This will be his third try for President.  His platform is Left-of-Center, as he has opposed the largely conservative (i.e., neoliberal) trends in Mexican politics since 1988.  U.S. citizens might think of him, roughly, as the Bernie Sanders of Mexican politics, but with a broader grassroots base among the poor, who face fewer impediments to vote than in the US.

 He is running under the banner of the Movement for National Regeneration (MORENA), a party he founded in 2014 after abandoning the PRD, a leftist Party he joined in 1988.  In 2006, after massive electoral fraud, Felipe Calderon, of the Conservative PAN Party, was declared President by a small margin against AMLO.  Thousands of his adherents for weeks occupied large sectors of Reforma Blvd, in the heart of Mexico City, claiming he was the legitimately elected President.  He served as a highly popular mayor of the Federal District (Mexico City) from 2000-2005, when he resigned to run for President.

From the state of Tabasco, in Southern Mexico, AMLO's electoral base is largely in the South.  The decision to begin his campaign in Juárez signals his intent to reach out to Northern Mexico, where the party is not well organized, but where citizens have been hammered by crime and drug-related violence, as well as massive corruption by leaders of the major (and well organized) parties in the North, the PRI and PAN.

AMLO has promised that should President Trump insist on building his wall, he will request the assistance of the United Nations to halt its construction.

PRI Candidate Jose Antonio Meade is not a PRI Party Member 

After six years of embarrassing, ineffective, flagrantly corrupt governance from PRI President Enrique Peña Nieto, nearly 60% of Mexicans say they will not even consider voting for a PRI candidate this year.  So discredited is public opinion against the slick arrogance that marks this party's current brand, the PRI actually picked a non-PRI member to head their ticket, in coalition with the PNA party, organized by an exceptionally powerful teachers union, and the Green Party of Mexico (PVEM).  Jose Antonio Meade served effectively enough as a cabinet member under PAN president Felipe Calderon that he was appointed Minister of Finance under Peña Nieto.  He belongs to no political party, but does sport a PhD in economics from Yale.  He has proven to be a less-than-charismatic campaigner, which puts him at a disadvantage vis a vis AMLO, a skilled orator.  Meade has campaigned on a platform to end corruption, but, given the shameless electoral fraud committed routinely by the PRI at grassroots levels, his credibility in being able to do so is questionable.  His greatest appeal aside from being a competent manager, is that he is not AMLO, who is greatly feared by the nation's elite, who have been lavished with official favoritism for several decades.

Conservative PAN Party Candidate Ricardo Anaya Running in Coalition With Leftist PRD Party

The two major parties in Mexico during the past 30 years, the PAN and the PRI, have been so discredited by corruption and incompetence, that they need to borrow the more credible reputations of other parties.  The highly Conservative PAN, traditionally Roman Catholic and pro-small business (think of the Republican Party in the 1950s) this year will run in coalition with the PRD, founded by the son of Lázaro Cárdenas--an almost mythical Leftist president from 1934-1940 who might be compared in his policies with FDR. 

Many Mexicans believe that national politics lost its way in 1988 when Cuahtemoc Cardenas (the son of President Cardenas) was denied the PRI nomination for president in 1988 in favor of Neoliberal (that is to say, contemporary Conservative in the US sense) Carlos Salinas de Gortari.  Today the regime of Salinas is universally reviled, and the ideological split it caused within the PRI led to the election in 2000 of PAN President Vicente Fox, the first non-PRI government in seven decades.The current alliance between the PAN and PRD is schizophrenic in policy terms--Nancy Pelosi Liberal vs Mitch McConnell Conservative--but it seeks to reignite what you might call the legitimate patriotism that made each party popular in the first place; that is, the Leftist legacy of the Mexican Revolution of 1910-1920, which created the PRI, and the sincere efforts of PAN during the 1960s-1990s to moderate the increasing corruption and and undemocratic forces within the PRI.  In this narrative, in short, the PRI in 1988 abandoned its promises to the masses in favor of what looks like Paul Ryan Republicanism for the rich--so much so that the son of Cardenas himself split from the PRI in 1988 to form the PRD, which continued to follow the promises of the Revolution.   On the other hand, the reformist PAN, once in power, simply adopted the highly corrupt, anti-democratic practices of the PRI and, even worse, pressured by the US, Calderon forged anti-drug cartel policies that led to the orgy of drug-related violence Mexico has been experiencing for more than a decade.

The problem with the coalition is that the PAN candidate, Ricardo Anaya, does not have the stature of, say, Francisco Barrio, of Chihuahua, who risked his life for improving democracy in Mexico during the 1980s; nor does the PRD have anyone of serious stature, after the departure of both Cuahtemoc Cardenas and AMLO in 2014, So it has no fighters who could credibly promise to restore the lost legitimacy of either party, much less reconcile the ideological differences between the PRD and PAN.

Anaya's only claim to fame is that he was a federal deputy (congressman) and President of the PAN party.

si el presidente estadunidense Donald Trump insiste en la construcción de un muro fronterizo, presentará una denuncia en la Organización de las Naciones Unidas. http://m.milenio.com/elecciones-mexico-2018/amlo-andres-manuel-lopez-obrador-donald-trump-muro-onu-denuncia-veracruz_0_1106889592.html

si el presidente estadunidense Donald Trump insiste en la construcción de un muro fronterizo, presentará una denuncia en la Organización de las Naciones Unidas. http://m.milenio.com/elecciones-mexico-2018/amlo-andres-manuel-lopez-obrador-donald-trump-muro-onu-denuncia-veracruz_0_1106889592.h