Lopez Obrador to Abandon Politics In Case of 2018 Mexican Presidential Loss Tihomir Gligorevic - InSerbia
go to original November 17, 2016

Andrés Manuel López Obrador, the Mexican left’s most visible figure and former presidential candidate, has announced that he will leave politics altogether if he is not victorious in the 2018 presidential election.

“If it unfortunately goes badly for me and my party in 2018, I will continue to plant ideas just as I do with plants until I die but I will not be a candidate for any political position,” López Obrador said in an interview with Mexico City-based daily Reforma.

In September of 2012, López Obrador renounced his membership in the center-left Party of the Democratic Revolution (PRD), the party he once led. Shortly after, he announced that he formed the Movimiento Regeneración Nacional (Morena) or National Regeneration Movement, a socialdemocratic party.

López Obrador was angered and disillusioned, as were other members of the PRD, with the fact that the party had signed center-right President Enrique Peña Nieto’s Pact for Mexico, a political agreement aimed at reforming several aspects of Mexican politics, education and the economy through public policy changes.

The Pact for Mexico was signed by Peña Nieto himself and the then-heads of the PRD (Jesús Zambrano Grijalva), Peña Nieto’s Institutional Revolutionary Party (PRI – Cristina Díaz), the conservative National Action Party (PAN – Gustavo Madero Muñoz) and later, the Green Party as a whole.

...Due to López Obrador’s stark ideological objections to the Pact for Mexico and prior disagreements within the PRD, he definitively left the party that he led from 1996 to 1999 after they agreed to sign the Pact, taking a good number of his party colleagues with him.

...The demise of the PRD, combined with the ever-falling approval rate of Peña Nieto and his PRI, means that López Obrador is looking like a strong choice again for the presidency given his socialdemocratic policies (in a country with rampant inequality and a lagging economy) and his strong anti-corruption rhetoric that has not been tainted with scandal, unlike many other Mexican politicians.

“If the Mexican people decide to vote for a deep and profound change and put their confidence in me, then I will head to my quinta (ranch) La Chingada as I do now, from time to time. However, if the majority says they do not want me to govern or if the mafia of political power stops us, then I will go La Chingada forever and take refuge in that wonderful place,” López Obrador said this week.

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Photo: Wikipedia

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