It’s not enough to say that the victorious Mexican presidential candidate AMLO is a socialist. To be more precise, he is a socialist of the Trotskyite world revolution variety.
Andres Manuel Lopez Obrador has won the Mexican presidential election. Lopez Obrador, better known by his initials AMLO, will be the first candidate from the left-wing political coalition Juntos Haremos Historia to hold the Mexican presidency after Sunday’s election.
A late-night official quick count from electoral authorities forecast that Mr Lopez Obrador would win with between 53 and 53.8 per cent of the vote, a remarkable margin not seen in the country for many years.
His rivals, José Antonio Meade of the long-dominant centrist PRI party and Ricardo Anaya of the center-right PAN, both conceded the election shortly after polls closed.
US President Donald Trump congratulated Lopez Obrador in a tweet late Sunday: ‘Congratulations to Andres Manuel Lopez Obrador on becoming the next President of Mexico. I look very much forward to working with him. There is much to be done that will benefit both the United States and Mexico!’
Lopez Obrador, 64, has fiercely opposed Trump’s policies on immigration, saying it is ‘a human right’ for people around the world to be able to resettle in America.
‘Soon, very soon, after the victory of our movement, we will defend migrants all over the American continent and the migrants of the world who, by necessity, must abandon their towns to find life in the United States; it’s a human right we will defend,’ Lopez Obrador said in a June speech reported by El Universal.
It’s going to be very interesting to see which conservatives finally abandon their ahistorical equalitarian-based civic nationalism and which follow Andres Manuel Lopez Obrador, Moammar Gaddafi, Mahmoud Ahmadinejad, and Sarah D’Almeida Hoyt to the logical conclusion that the contemporary United States is not a nation, but rather, an idea that belongs to all nations and that immigration to the USA is a basic human right.
This choice always going to be made. The logic involved was always remorseless and inescapable, all that was required was for events to catch up to it. That’s the core reason for consistent conservative failure; it reliably requires one to defend an illogical and intrinsically untenable position due to its basis in rhetoric rather than science, history, or logic.
And make no mistake, AMLO has a serious mandate for a headlong dive into revolution. His popularity is off the charts.
The 64-year-old former Mexico City mayor won with the widest margin in a presidential election since the 1980s, according to an official quick count that showed him taking more than half the vote — some 30 points ahead of his nearest rival.