The Mexican Model

Does Morena’s success offer a blueprint for the left? An exchange.

The Paradoxes of Morena

In a world increasingly overtaken by right-wing populism, Mexico is a rare case where a progressive government has remained in control through multiple elections and made solid advances. Conservative parties have mostly vanished from the political landscape, while Morena, the ruling left-wing party, holds a supermajority in Congress, governs twenty-three of thirty-two states, and has led the country under two presidents. Current president Claudia Sheinbaum’s approval rating stands at 76 percent. Never in Mexico’s still-nascent democratic history has a single party amassed such sweeping power.

Morena’s strength has drawn the attention of the global left, prompting reflection on the political strategies that have enabled Mexico’s left to achieve such extraordinary electoral success.

Perhaps the most important reason is the most obvious: Morena has delivered for its base. The transformation in the lives of working-class Mexicans under its rule is undeniable. Since taking power in late 2018, average labor income has risen 30 percent above inflation, lifting more than 13 million people out of poverty. Inequality, measured by the income share of the top 1 percent, has seen its steepest and fastest drop in almost a century, matching in four years what had previously taken nearly two decades to accomplish.

These changes are the result of Morena’s efforts, which have included dismantling a set of labor policies that condemned nearly half of Mexican workers to poverty wages. Under Morena, the minimum wage has tripled at the border and more than doubled nationwide, vacation days have doubled, employer retirement contributions have tripled, outsourcing has been curbed, and secret-ballot union elections are now mandatory. This package of reforms is a historic achievement that has improved millions of lives in ways the left has long only imagined.

As a result, a renewed sense of hope has taken root in Mexico. Trust in government has more than doubled, satisfaction with democracy has surged, and belief that the state governs for the people has reached a historic high.

Yet Morena has also left key pillars of neoliberalism intact. Most notably, it has avoided enacting comprehensive fiscal reforms to expand the redistributive and developmental capacities of the state. Instead, it has clung to austerity and budget reallocations to finance modest infrastructure projects and cash transfer programs, while underinvesting in public health, education, the civilian police, and long-term development strategies.

One can only speculate why Morena has not pushed a deeper redistributive agenda. Perhaps it fears backlash from the business elite, particularly because Mexico’s economy is so globally entangled. Or perhaps the reason is simpler and more troubling: corruption within its own ranks.

Regardless of the cause, the outcome is a terrible paradox: for all Morena has achieved for the working classes, its achievements have not been sufficient to guarantee nationwide victories at the local level. As a result, to secure power across the country, the party has resorted to shortcuts, relying on age-old patronage networks and allying with members of the political old guard. In fact, a fifth of the Morena coalition’s legislators and governors are former members of right-wing or center-right parties.

This has diluted Morena’s capacity to advance progressive reforms, many of which have been stalled or abandoned due to internal negotiations. More troubling still, Morena has ignored serious corruption allegations within its ranks, protecting its members rather than defending the ideals that brought the party to power.

Among Morena’s most controversial policies is its judicial reform, which will replace in three years the entire judiciary with judges elected by popular vote. The idea for the reform stems from the correct recognition that, in deeply unequal countries like those in Latin America, the judiciary has often served economic interests and blocked, weakened, or diluted democratically enacted reforms under the guise of legal doctrine. The Mexican Supreme Court has a long history of favoring the economically powerful, issuing rulings that have denied workers the right to claim unpaid hours, allowed workers to renounce their own labor protections, or failed to acknowledge workers’ rights altogether. The court has systematically blocked the implementation of progressive taxes, upheld massive tax evasion schemes, and obstructed popular large-scale public infrastructure projects. The judiciary has historically been opaque, nepotistic, and in some instances openly corrupt, and as a result it does not deliver justice to the majority of the country.

While reforming the judiciary was the right instinct, Morena’s judicial reform was so reckless, rushed, and erratic that it left wide openings for oligarchic influence to persist. The magnitude of the first judicial elections this June was overwhelming, featuring dozens of nonpartisan candidates on an unusually large ballot. The lack of clear party affiliations and accessible information severely limited voters’ ability to make informed choices. This informational vacuum empowered local power brokers and ideologically diverse factions within Morena, including some with conservative leanings, to shape outcomes in favor of special interests. The process became so poorly regulated that Morena’s own Senate president later acknowledged that individuals with links to organized crime were mistakenly allowed on the ballot.

Moreover, the reform did not include mechanisms for reelection for judges on the most powerful tribunals, including the Supreme Court. This significantly reduces citizens’ capacity to hold these judges accountable. Additionally, the absence of proper campaign finance oversight risks deepening the influence of oligarchic forces over the judiciary.

This poses an existential threat for the left. Sheinbaum campaigned on judicial reform as a cornerstone of her agenda. With 72 percent of the public supporting reform, and many people expecting it to reduce corruption and impunity, failure to meet those expectations could turn judicial reform into Morena’s Achilles heel, and could risk revitalizing a fractured and aimless conservative opposition.

Mexico remains shockingly unequal and poor for a country of its economic size, and the current judicial reforms won’t necessarily improve access to justice. For now, Morena benefits from the popularity of its labor reforms and the weakness of an opposition discredited by decades of not delivering for the Mexican people. But without a deeper commitment to structural change, this political honeymoon will not last.

Morena must purge its corrupt actors, shed its fear of market backlash, and fully embrace a vision bold enough to build the broad, thriving middle class Mexico has historically lacked. The supermajority that Morena currently has in Congress is a historic but narrow opportunity that must be seized to advance a radically ambitious agenda to expand public health, provide quality education, solve the urban housing shortage, and enact fiscal reform. The time is now.

—Viri Ríos

The Threat of Authoritarianism

In the 2024 Mexican election, the left-wing party Morena maintained control of the presidency with its candidate Claudia Sheinbaum, who won with an overwhelming 60 percent of the vote, compared to the 53 percent with which former president Andrés Manuel López Obrador had won in 2018. Morena’s tremendous electoral success has generated the curiosity and enthusiasm of the international left. In contrast to other countries where the far right has risen as an electoral force, Mexico presents a striking case of the consolidation of a left party’s hegemony.

Moreover, the U.S. government’s hostility to Mexico (along with many other countries) under the second Trump administration has not been entirely negative for Sheinbaum. She has been relatively successful at navigating the bilateral relationship with the United States, allowing her to display an image of national and international leadership.

Sheinbaum’s election also represented a victory for López Obrador, who remains Morena’s principal leader. Sheinbaum’s previous experience as Mexico City’s head of government gave her a strong record to run on, but the key to her success was AMLO’s decision to anoint her as his successor. Sheinbaum’s victory indicated that a majority of voters wanted continuity with AMLO’s governmental project. Almost a year into her term, the president’s approval ratings hover over 70 percent.

Sheinbaum has already shown her intention to sustain the accomplishments of her predecessor in two key policy areas: cash handouts to vulnerable sectors and a sustained increase in the minimum wage. However, Sheinbaum has also shown continuities with some of the more disturbing features of the Obradorista model, including a tendency to centralize power in the presidency and the president’s party, as well as the militarization of public administration. Morena’s international enthusiasts often fail to perceive this authoritarian dimension of the party’s success.

Morena is currently the only political party perceived as truly representative of the great majority of Mexican society, especially people marginalized by the economic modernization of the last thirty years. By refusing for decades to offer meaningful representation for Mexico’s lower classes, the opposition parties laid the foundations for their current crisis. To this day, they embrace an oligarchic idea of democracy. That is why AMLO’s triumph in 2018 legitimized the institutions of Mexican democracy in the eyes of many who previously had little reason to believe in them. Since then, Morena has provided tangible benefits to the majority of the country.

But the party has used this popular support to carry out a project of centralizing power. From the start of his administration, AMLO often attacked figures or institutions that could limit the scope of presidential action or make the exercise of power and public spending more transparent. Toward the end of his term, a qualitative change took place: he moved from gestures and attitudes hostile to pluralism and accountability to an effort to transform the Mexican state in an authoritarian direction. This transformation, which Sheinbaum has sustained, has consisted of dismantling or obstructing institutions that emerged during the Mexican transition to democracy: an administrative transparency body, independent electoral institutions, and an autonomous judiciary.

Morena invokes its idea of the Mexican people as the ultimate and unquestionable justification for its political operations. But this “people” excludes many who have made legitimate and indispensable democratic demands on the Mexican state, including movements for environmentalism, feminism, and the victims of violence. The legitimate people benefit Morena’s political control; everyone else represents shady elite interests.

Morena’s supporters have justified the concentration of authority in the name of strengthening public power against corporate and media oligarchs. AMLO summarized the objective as such: “to separate political power from economic power.” But the results have been mixed. The party has faced corruption charges in precisely the sectors in which it intended to strengthen the country’s strategic sovereignty: energy, food, and medicine distribution. And its achievements in labor policy and cash provision have been undermined by failures in other areas of popular welfare, most notably with a vast decrease in public health coverage.

Similarly, Morena has presented its recent judicial reforms, which turn every judge’s seat throughout the legal system into an elected position, as a democratic experiment aimed at solving problems in the administration of justice and the corruption of the Mexican judiciary. But the process was designed to ensure a majority of magistrates sympathetic to Morena, and popular election of all judges and ministers poses a challenge to the division of powers within the state. The selection of candidates was carried out through committees appointed by the executive and legislative branches (both under Morena’s control)—which was still not enough to prevent candidates linked to criminal groups from competing. The reforms also created a new elected body, the Court of Judicial Discipline, which has the power to remove any members of the judiciary it determines to not have met discretionary criteria, such as “excellence” in the performance of their duties.

In the first judicial elections in June, Morena-friendly candidates won all the seats on both the Supreme Court and the Court of Judicial Discipline. In the days prior to the election, the government distributed “guides” it prepared that told citizens who to vote for. Perhaps the most surprising fact was the low turnout: only 13 percent of the electorate turned out to vote, and of those voters, 22 percent cancelled their ballots. Morena’s goal of political capture, however, is complicated by fragmentations within the party. It is likely that the results of the judicial election will simultaneously consolidate the party’s hegemony and the capture of the Mexican judicial apparatus by a multiplicity of interest groups aligned with factions within the ruling coalition.

There is another authoritarian dimension to Morena’s political project that is often overlooked: the formation of a new model of civilian−military government. Today the military has powers unprecedented in modern Mexican history. Yet at the same time, Mexico has seen a deterioration of state control over territory run by criminal organizations—a process that began in the late twentieth century but has reached its apex during Morena’s years in power. This is the paradox of Morena’s hegemony: it has concentrated powers that seem increasingly limited and ineffective, because they leave people vulnerable in both the countryside and cities where criminal groups violate and extort the populations, and in extreme cases have become substitutes for government. Morena’s centralization of political control has occurred in this larger ocean of fragmenting civil and state authority, in the face of the growing power of the army and criminal groups.

How will these trends converge in the near future? One possible indication is a change in security policy that Sheinbaum has undertaken: an increase in fighting crime under civilian leadership. Sheinbaum’s security policy is in some ways an exhibition of her predecessor’s failures: in six months, her government has surpassed the figures for high-impact arrests during AMLO’s entire six-year term. At the same time, according to a recent security perception survey, 61 percent of people feel unsafe in their cities. These dynamics may define Sheinbaum’s term in office and the broader significance of Morena’s democratic legacy.

—Humberto Beck

Viri Ríos Responds

I do not share Humberto’s classification of Mexico as an authoritarian country. It’s fair to question how the judicial reform was implemented, but arguing that the country is undemocratic because it challenged the mechanism used to elect the judiciary lacks critical context.

The Mexican judiciary’s was never truly independent or neutral. It upheld a system where judges served the powerful, not the people. For years, the judiciary operated without accountability, protecting tax evasion, undermining labor rights, and striking down democratic reforms.That wasn’t a democratic check on power. It was elite rule in disguise.

To truly evaluate how democratic a government is, we must look beyond procedural and institutional understandings and ask whether citizens can meaningfully shape their government, and whether institutions serve the common good. In my view, that has happened more under Morena than under any previous democratic government in Mexico.

To address concerns about Morena’s consolidation of power, it’s helpful to consider Adam Przeworski’s definition of democracy as a system in which ruling parties can lose. Under that framework, Mexico remains solidly democratic. Morena has lost and continues to lose elections. Just a month ago, in the most recent round of local elections, Morena lost 65 percent of the municipalities in contention. In the last presidential race, 40 percent of voters supported the opposition, which now governs a majority of all municipalities nationwide. Even Morena’s supermajority in Congress relies on coalition partners who are not ideologically aligned with its project and who have increasingly asserted their independence. These are not signs of authoritarian consolidation. They are unmistakable markers of a democracy that remains alive and fighting.

It’s true that Morena made a serious mistake by reforming Mexico’s transparency institute, which had been an effective source of information for the press. However, nuance matters, and it is not accurate to argue that Mexico has become authoritarian because it brought some autonomous bodies under executive control. By that standard, Chile, Canada, Hong Kong, and Japan, where similar functions fall under the executive, would also have to be called authoritarian. The notion that depoliticized, technocratic bodies are inherently superior often masks an effort to insulate policy from democratic contestation. Politicization is not a threat to democracy. It is its necessary condition.

The idea that Morena is a unified, hegemonic political movement where party loyalty supersedes democracy is pure fantasy. Morena is not a monolith. It is a deeply fragmented party, with multiple factions actively competing against each other.

The real danger for Mexico is that a substantial number of its elected officials come from parties that do not share a genuinely transformative left-oriented vision. If Morena fails to define itself ideologically and allows these opposition forces to shape its agenda, it risks opening the door to a conservative restoration under a new guise.

There is a real risk that Morena could reform electoral laws to make it harder for the opposition to win elections. If that happens, the left should be the first to condemn it, because it would weaken the ability of organized groups to hold the ruling party accountable. But any debate on this issue must rely on evidence and comparative analysis, not speculation.

This is important because the Mexican opposition often accuses the government of authoritarianism simply for adopting institutions that already exist in other democracies but differ from those created in Mexico in the early 2000s. The debate is frequently built on falsehoods. A clear example is the current reaction to the upcoming electoral reform: opposition parties and their allies have already branded it undemocratic without even knowing its content. They claim it will eliminate proportional representation, despite the president explicitly stating that this is not the case. This is a familiar tactic: fabricating crises and repeating them until they are perceived as truth.

That’s why the left must move beyond performative outrage and sweeping accusations of authoritarianism and instead focus on ensuring that the democratic opening underway becomes a lasting transformation, not a missed opportunity. Mexico’s democracy is, for the first time, expanding in ways that meaningfully engage with and deliver tangible gains to the country’s vast underclass.

The task now is to deepen this progress, not distort it with misdiagnoses.

—Viri Ríos

Humberto Beck Responds

In her analysis, Viri identifies the key paradoxes of Morena’s left-wing project. She notes that the party has elevated millions from poverty yet preserved some of the pillars of the neoliberal and oligarchic state. She also highlights the contradictions in some of Morena’s most cherished initiatives, such as the judicial reform, which is intended to democratize access to justice but is likely to entrench the capture of judicial institutions by powerful interest groups.

However, after seven years in power, Morena’s paradoxes have become so profound that they raise the question of whether the party remains a left-wing project. The party has enacted measures favoring popular interests, but it has also become a political machine characterized by widespread corruption and catastrophic inefficiency regarding issues of major public importance, such as public health and safety. Policies that ensure democratic popular representation are only one aspect of Morena’s broader aim to secure its long-term hold on power.

Under Sheinbaum, Morena has reinforced the potentially repressive features of its political model. As well as attacking alternative centers of institutional power, the party has recently passed a series of authoritarian reforms: the militarization of public safety, the authorization of the armed forces to monitor the population, and the creation of what critics have labeled a potential “authoritarian digital infrastructure.” It is creating coercive surveillance apparatuses that expand military intervention in society without proper civilian oversight. Additionally, with the complicity of public authorities run by loyalists, Morena politicians are increasingly resorting to flagrant censorship to silence critics.

If any of this was part of a project for the radical restructuring of Mexican society, we would expect Morena to crack down on corruption, which it has largely ignored. A growing number of corruption scandals involving Morena officials demonstrate that the state still serves to enrich political elites.

Unless a fundamental reversal takes place during the remainder of Sheinbaum’s term, Morena will continue to build a system of political control and legal impunity in the interest of a new political class that justifies its authoritarian project in the name of social justice. As it stands, Morena is an obstacle to the creation of a genuinely popular democratic political formation in Mexico.

—Humberto Beck

Viri Ríos is a columnist for various Latin American media oulets and is author of No Es Normal and other books on the legal roots of inequality. She runs Mexico Decoded, an English-language Substack on Mexico’s politics and economics.

Humberto Beck teaches history at El Colegio de México. He is the author of Insurrección, anarquía, revolución: una anatomía política del instante.