Latin America’s second largest economy will go to the polls on Sunday to choose its next president and a new congress at a time of widespread disillusionment at unchecked corruption, poverty and violence that has claimed at least 200,000 lives since 2007.
The presidential frontrunner, a 64-year-old leftist called Andrés Manuel López Obrador, has claimed his widely anticipated landslide victory will represent the fourth great sea change in Mexican history after independence in 1821, the 1857-1860 War of the Reform and the Mexican revolution of 1910.
“It seems like a dream but we are just a few days away from achieving Mexico’s transformation,” López Obrador, or Amlo as he is best known, told flag-waving supporters during a recent rally in the rundown satellite city of Ecatepec.
Amlo’s foes beg to differ, painting him as a democracy-allergic, Hugo Chávez-style demagogue who will indeed transform Mexico – by crashing its economy.
But many on Mexico’s left are not convinced Amlo will be much of a radical once in power, and analysts say that a better comparison is with Brazil’s former president Luiz Inácio Lula da Silva, who oversaw a period of economic growth even as he battled inequality.
Amlo’s consistent dominance in the polls has been such that his opponents have often seemed an irrelevance.
Perhaps the only man capable of spoiling his party on Sunday is Ricardo Anaya, a shaven-headed 39-year-old lawyer from the National Action party (Pan) who profilers have described as a curious mix of yoga fanatic and cut-throat political operator.
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