Mexico is right ... for conservative populism

AMLO’s unique personality may have been the key holding back the right; expect a backlash soon

The Mexico Political Economist (MPE) — whom you should all subscribe to! — wrote about the strange death of conservatism in Mexico. The right-wing National Action Party (PAN) is hanging on by a thread while “conservatism” and other synonyms for the ideology are labels that politicians of all stripes run away from.

Needless to say, this is not the case in Latin America! Brazil and Chile have resurgent U.S.-style right-wing movements. Argentina has Milei’s Libertarian party, which despite it’s ostensible “libertarianism” has no fear of engaging in culture war politics.¹ Elsewhere in Colombia, Peru, El Salvador, the right is quite powerful. Even Uruguay has a solid center-right opposition.

So what happened in Mexico? The Mexico Political Economist advances several theories. I’ll put them here from the most historical to the most recent:

1. The inheritance from the War of the Reform (1858-61) makes it hard for the PAN to openly appeal to the religious right. Liberal forces defeated conservatism in that war and established what became the modern Mexican state.

2. Social conservatives in Mexico later went with an individualistic American-style ideology that doesn’t fit the Mexican character.

3. Felipe Calderón presided over a collapse in security, neutering the right’s advantage on crime.

4. The conservative PAN aligned itself with the PRI and the left-wing PRD, losing its identity in the process.

5. The right is crazily divided internally by personality right now.

6. AMLO was a brilliant politician.

I don’t really buy any of these except the last two. The PAN was born in 1939 as a pretty openly Catholic political party, at least as religious as any postwar Christian Democratic party in Europe. The War of the Reform discredited open theocracy, not modern conservatism. So I don’t think point #1 fits the historical record, although I’m open to persuasion.

I have no idea where the idea that the PAN adopted American-style conservatism (point #2) comes from: it wasn’t particularly libertarian in the 2000 election, the 2006 election, the 2012 election, the 2018 election, and certainly not when it formed the big mushy 2024 coalition. Plus, point #2 is contradicted by point #4. Point #3 is a thing that happened, but every Mexican government has failed to get a grip on the problem.

So why is conservatism in eclipse? As the MPE said, the PAN is a divided mess. More importantly, Morena built a strong political machine and redistributed income to benefit millions of Mexicans. Meanwhile, AMLO himself steered clear of divisive progressive “woke” issues — he himself governed as quite the social conservative. Moreover, until his last year in office he also governed as a quite an economic conservative, running small deficits and keeping taxes low.

But I don’t think it’s going to last! Mexico could go the way of the southern cone nations right quick if even a moderate political talent came along.

Mexico is very conservative

How conservative is it?

If your experience of Mexico is limited to neighborhoods like this one then what is coming below will genuinely shock you (pic from 2024)

Well, a while ago this blog used the World Values Survey to point out that the Chilean left was idiotically trying to impose the world’s wokest constitution on a remarkably conservative people. Let’s do the same exercise for Mexico, except instead of comparing it to Chile and Argentina, we’ll compare it to Chile (an obviously conservative Latin American nation) and the United States.

On the other hand, if you spent time in neighborhoods like this one, then what follows won’t surprise you at all (photo from 2012)

Left-right spectrum

Mexicans are aggressively centrist! But unlike Americans (this may come as a shock) they pile up more at the extremes than citizens of the United States. And the right wing is quite a bit heavier than the left.

Still, as we mentioned it’s quite possible that “left” and “right” mean different things in Mexico than they do elsewhere. So let’s get more specific.

Redistribution

The World Values Survey contains a specific question about whether the state should equalize incomes or allow more for individual incentives.

And … whoa. A bit more Americans put equalizing incomes above all else than do Mexicans. And way more Mexicans think that individual incentives are more important than do Americans. Like, way more Mexicans, almost twice as many. These data jibe with my individual experiences, as biased as they may be.²

These data don’t mean that AMLO didn’t make himself popular by transferring income to the poor. Look at that left tail! But he also knew what he was doing by refraining from imposing taxes on the rich.

Duty to have children

Liberalism prioritizes individual choice. A progressive liberal might want to have children, maybe even lots of children, but they won’t feel that individuals have a duty to procreate for the good of society. Americans (and young Argentines) are liberal in this broad sense: basically none of them “strongly agree” with the above proposition.

Mexicans, like Chileans, are not like that.

We shouldn’t exaggerate this, because “disagree” wins a plurality … but that fat tail towards “agree” and “agree strongly” has no comparison in the United States.

Abortion

Let’s take a look a big one.

Do I need to say more?

Homosexuality

This one should be surprising to people who have only been to certain parts of Mexico City, where the new variant of the rainbow flag flies all over and same sex couples in public are more common than in most of Brooklyn:

The Mexican center of gravity is far more to the right of the United States. In fact, it is to the right of Chile. More people are quite intolerant. And the large plurality of Americans who simply don’t care at all about sexual orientation has no parallel south of the border. This does not vary by age as much as you might think: 24% of Mexicans under age-29 think homosexuality is “never justifiable” and only 13% are fully relaxed about it.

Patriarchy

Finally, let’s look at this question: should men have a bigger right to a job than women? It encapsulates assumptions about a wide variety of gender roles, which is why it’s useful to judge overall conservatism.

Mexicans aren’t quite as conservative as Chileans in this respect, and a majority do disagree with the proposition. Nonetheless, barely one-in-twenty Americans support the idea whereas almost one-in-four Mexicans do. And young Mexicans barely differ from their elders: support is 23% for the under-29 set versus 24% for the general population.

TLDR: Mexico is much more conservative than the United States. There is no small amount of apparent hypocrisy on the redistribution issue, given Morena’s popularity, but what else is new?³

Morena has a Democratic problem

That is a big-D “Democratic” problem, as in the Democratic Party of the United States.⁴ The Democratic Party did not run a “woke” campaign in 2024. But the Democratic Party could not escape the woke stances taken by so many members of its coalition. Nor could it stand to throw those coalition members under the bus and move to the center except in a mushiest milquetoast way.⁵ So a chunk of the electorate punished for positions the party did not advocate but which its supporters did.

Morena has an extremely vocal woke set of fellow travelers. This includes an extremely vocal trans-rights movement, radical feminists (which has sometimes engaged in violence), and a big group of statue destroyers. The most radical elements are not part of the party (and most trans advocates in Mexico are remarkably reasonable). But … a lot of the radicalism is associated with Morena, or President Sheinbaum.

So far, none of this has provoked much of a backlash. The small Social Encounter Party tried to channel serious social conservativism — and it was allied with Morena, no less, in a sign of AMLO’s political genius — but it eventually faded away.

The question is whether that lack of backlash is a permanent condition for Mexico or simply the confluence of some idiosyncratic local conditions, not least the fact that AMLO governed (and governed brilliantly!) as a conservative populist.

Claudia Sheinbaum is much more ostentatiously “woke” than AMLO. The former president’s wokest moment was his bizarre obsession with making Spain apologize for colonizing Mexico.⁶ Sheinbaum, on the other hand, can very easily be tied to all sorts of cultural overreach in Mexico.⁷ It won’t be easy for her to throw parts of her progressive coalition under the bus, and it won’t be easy for her to dissassociate her party from the more radical parts of the Morena coalition.

Under those circumstances, it seems to me that would not be difficult for a charismatic political entrepreneur to ignite a culture war and ride it to the National Palace. They wouldn’t even have to seize control of the PAN; they could ride a smaller party to victory.

I mean, people, if Geert Wilders can do this in the Netherlands, then somebody can do this in Mexico. And one thing the two countries have in common is that under a hyperliberal facade and a like of left-wing spending policies, both are quite a bit more conservative under the hood than their ostensibly similar neighbors.

Full circle

And this brings us back to the last post. Mexico is developing a migration problem and it is only going to get worse if the Trump administration cracks down on entry. So far there is no sign of Mexican voters getting excised about migration in practice as it actually impacts Mexico. But how do they feel about it theory?

Slightly more liberal than Americans were in 2018. Slightly. Not that unlike Chile, which is the middle of huge backlash to a relatively small wave of migration. Would you count on this distribution of opinion to prevent a populist backlash that will turf out the party of “Ms. Bridge” if migrants keep arriving at the pace of the last few years?⁸

And to this we can add crime. At some point the Mexican electorate is going to conclude that crime isn’t like the weather — governments can control should they so choose.

TLDR: I predict the emergence of culture war politics with a vengeance in Mexico, and the electoral resurgence of the right, this time with populism. I don’t think that MPE was thinking that the Mexican right needs to go full Trumpista when he wrote, “the right’s first true step out of political oblivion should be more pueblos and less Polanco,” but that is, I think, what it will amount to.

But I would very much like to hear what others think? Is the right dead in Mexico and we’re fated to have a Morena hegemony? Or is the only way for the right to regain influence is to become a moderate democratic centrist alternative to the wannabe one-party state? Or is my above argument correct, and the United Mexican States is one moderately competent political entrepreneur away from going the way of Argentina and Brazil and (soon) Chile and … well … the Netherlands and Sweden and Austria and Italy and the other United States right to the north?

Inquiring minds want to know! I want to know. How is this wrong?

1. In 2010, the Peronists renamed the “Día de la Raza” as the “Día del Respeto a la Diversidad Cultural.” That was, uh, well, not popular, but the Peronists didn’t seem to care. Then Javier Milei comes to office. He could rename it officially, but much better to just put out this video and watch the left burn itself down in the court of public opinion by attacking it.

2. The surveys have cross-tabs by age and education. Younger Mexicans, like younger Chileans, are more conservative than their elders on many issues.

3. The Mexico Political Economist has a fascinating take on why conservative right-wing Mexicans would support redistribution here. Money quote: “From this vantage point, the conclusion might be stranger than Ríos’ proposition: Mexicans aren’t more left-wing than they were before. Neither are they more conservative. They are—after centuries of inequality, repression, and bad government—happy to get back what they have paid into the system in the form of social programmes while otherwise hoping the State will just get out of their way. [Call it] Socialist Libertarianism.” I feel like

Ed West

would love this description.

4. Morena also has many small-d democratic problems, but whether its lack of internal democracy bad depends on how you think political parties should be governed. I’m quite agnostic on whether party primaries and internal democracy are good things.

5. I’m glad to know you keep a Glock under your bed, Madame Vice-president! Sadly, for most other voters this knowledge did not dissociate you from past statements or the wilder members of your coalition.

6. A Mexican goes to Spain and accosts the first Spanish person he sees. “I demand an apology, sir! Your ancestors pillaged my country!” The Spanish fellow blinks. “I’m afraid you’re mistaken. Your ancestors did that. Mine stayed home.”

7. And, oy gevalt, President Sheinbaum still insists that Spain apologize for colonizing Mexico.

8. I’m no Donald Trump. “Señora Puente” does not sound punchy in Spanish, it sounds like a name. But you get the idea.