Leftist leader forges uneasy ‘detente’ with business elite
MEXICO CITY — On the campaign trail, presidential front-runner Andres Manuel Lopez Obrador has railed against a corrupt and “rapacious minority” of business executives who oppose him because they know they will have to “stop stealing” if he wins the July 1 election.
Executives have fired back with newspaper ads charging the leftist politician, who is making his third run for the presidency, is a populist demagogue who would set Mexico back decades by returning it to a time of heavy-handed state intervention.
Now the two sides, by all appearances, have sat down and talked it out.
After more than a decade of mutual recriminations, Mexico’s wealthy elite and Lopez Obrador have lately reached something resembling an uneasy truce. It’s not that they have reconciled their differences, but rather it’s the result of pragmatic calculation by both sides.
Business leaders have come to realize they would need to work with Lopez Obrador as the final arbiter of regulations and policy-making. The candidate knows he would need investment to continue so there’s no economic instability or boycotting of his projects.
“I think it’s increasingly inevitable to a lot of people in the business community that they are going to have to make peace with a Lopez Obrador administration, and it’s becoming equally obvious to Lopez Obrador that he’s going to have to govern and make deals with people that he hadn’t originally reached out to,” said Andrew Selee, a longtime Mexico analyst and author of “Vanishing Frontiers,” a book about Mexico and the United States.
“So there is a bit of a coming together. It’s a detente, I think. At this point it might be a bit much to say it’s a peace,” Selee added. “That doesn’t mean there’s an alliance, but there’s at least a recognition that they need to be talking with each other.”
Lopez Obrador has led opinion polls since the beginning of the campaign, and some recent surveys give him a 2-1 advantage over his nearest rival, conservative Ricardo Anaya, a natural ally of the country’s wealthy.