Mexican president’s popularity soars even as country faces persistent turmoil
Amlo’s pension program helped boost his approval rating, but critics point to his various shortcomings as his term nears its end
Oscar Lopez in Mexico CityLife isn’t easy for Teodila Faustino, who shares a cinder-block home with her husband, five children and several grandchildren on the outskirts of Mexico City. At 69, she has retired from the restaurant where she made about $50 (£46) a week, and her employer left her no pension.
Other than selling tacos occasionally on the street, Faustino’s only lifeline is a state pension through which she receives about $280 (£224) every two months. This, in part, explains her undying gratitude to the man who launched the program: Andrés Manuel López Obrador.
“No president has ever done what he is doing,” she said in a recent interview. “I am where I am thanks to him. I don’t know how to thank him.”
Such fervor for López Obrador, or Amlo as he is commonly known, is widespread in Mexico: the president has maintained an approval rating of at least 60% throughout his presidency, making him one of the most popular leaders in the world.
Critics, particularly in the foreign press, are quick to point out Amlo’s many shortcomings: his failure to tackle violence, his efforts to undermine democratic norms, his fixation on fossil fuels and his increasing dependence on the powerful military.
Meanwhile, with López Obrador constitutionally barred from running for a second term, it remains to be seen whether this popularity will be enough to buoy his protege: former Mexico City mayor Claudia Sheinbaum was selected in September as the Morena party nominee in 2024, but she lacks Amlo’s charisma and fiery charm.
Still, with less than a year to go until the elections, polls show Morena is well ahead of its rivals. With campaigning barely begun, the party’s enormous head start is due mostly to one simple fact: across Mexico, López Obrador remains largely adored.
“Amlo’s popularity is always talked about as something inexplicable,” said Juan David Rojas, a Latin America analyst. “But it’s very simple: he does things that Mexicans like.”
Among those popular policies are the cash transfers received by millions of elderly Mexicans, including Faustino: the nearly $2bn budgeted for the program this year represents an increase of over 600% compared with 2018, according to the analysis firm Mexico Evalúa.
López Obrador first launched the pensions program some 20 years ago as mayor of Mexico City, sensing a need among senior citizens in the capital who had little in the way of pensions or retirement funds. After he was elected in 2018, he expanded the program nationwide.
“He hit a home run with something that was lacking,” said Gonzalo Hernández Licona, a former head of Coneval, the government agency that measures poverty. “And he made it a political home run because families started saying, ‘Oh what a nice guy.’”
Former Mexico City mayor Claudia Sheinbaum is Amlo’s protege and a possible successor to the presidency. Photograph: Henry Romero/Reuters
And as well as increasing welfare spending, López Obrador and his governing party have enacted a host of popular reforms, including raising the minimum wage by double digits every year, increasing mandatory vacation days, slashing government salaries and forcing major companies to pay their tax bills.
“For the average voter, the president is seen as doing something against the elites,” said Rojas. “He’s nailing these big businesses that don’t pay up.”
The president’s policies have also had a practical impact: a recent report from Coneval showed that poverty in Mexico had dropped by almost six percentage points since 2018, meaning over 5 million Mexicans were pulled out of poverty since López Obrador took office.
“For someone like me who’s always going hungry, it’s a big help,” Faustino said of her government pension. “They say that all politicians steal – but at least [Amlo] is sharing.”
But while López Obrador has hailed the poverty drop as “historic”, analysts say he’s only managed a mild bump on what was already a downward trend, thanks in large part to his dramatic increase in the minimum wage.
Meanwhile, other numbers in the government’s latest report are less encouraging: extreme poverty actually increased by a percentage point, meaning an additional 400,000 people had insufficient income to put food on the table and lacked other basic services.
Worse still, the number of people without access to healthcare more than doubled, a disastrous change that analysts attributed mainly to Amlo’s elimination of the Seguro Popular insurance program.
“Without the lack of healthcare, poverty would have declined even further and extreme poverty would have dropped,” said Hernández.
And beyond its obvious political benefits, the actual economic impact of the president’s cash transfers is unclear. Amlo’s flagship pension program has no income requirement, meaning anyone over 65, even those who are relatively well-off, are eligible.
At the same time, López Obrador eliminated arguably one of Mexico’s most successful anti-poverty programs, Prospera, which gave poor mothers an amount of money for each of their children, with specific requirements like taking them to health checkups and keeping them in school.
“The way that the cash transfer programs work in Mexico right now, they’re not reaching the extreme poor,” said Luciana de Souza Leão, a sociology professor at the University of Michigan who has studied Mexico’s welfare programs.
Ceci is a mother of four who works as a cleaner in Oaxaca state, one of Mexico’s poorest. Asking that her last name be withheld for privacy concerns, Ceci explained that, under the previous government, she had received cash transfers for her children.
“It helped a lot with buying school supplies,” she said.
Now, with Prospera gone, Ceci’s family only receives one lump sum through her mother, which means less money for the household overall. And there are no incentives to keep her kids in class or to take them to the doctor.
“It’s just per family,” Ceci said. “I don’t know if they register whether the kids are going to school or not. I have no idea.”
For Leão, the sociologist, experiences like Ceci’s demonstrate how eliminating certain programs that required interaction with government institutions, be it schools or health clinics, can mean cutting off access to the welfare overall.
Prospera “linked people to their basic right to education and health”, she said. “The poor families I was talking to, they don’t have much of a link to the state any more.”
But while experts may disagree on the effectiveness of Amlo’s policies, the president has almost free rein to laud their success, through his two-hour-long daily news conferences, social media and the state-funded outlets that parrot the government’s message.
“He controls the narrative,” said Rojas. “Everything revolves around him.”
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