US, Mexico in tiff to be first

Mexico City – When Donald Trump insisted on renaming the updated North American Free Trade Agreement, the “America First” president pointedly listed the US before the other countries, calling it the US-Mexico-Canada Agreement (USMCA).

But Mexican president-elect Andres Manuel Lopez Obrador announced on Tuesday he was putting Mexico first, saying the deal would be known in Spanish as “T-MEC,” after conducting a poll of his Twitter followers.

That’s short for the “Tratado Mexico-Estados Unidos-Canada”, which translates as the Mexico-United States-Canada Treaty.

Lopez Obrador, who takes office on December 1, had launched a Twitter poll a week ago to rebrand the deal to “something pronounceable” in Spanish.

He asked his 4.5 million followers to vote between three options: TEUMECA, which put the US first and got 16% of the vote; T-MEC, which put Mexico first and got 45%; or “none of the above,” which got 39%. More than 102 000 people participated.

The poll “delivered a clear preference for T-MEC,” tweeted Lopez Obrador, calling on outgoing Mexican President Enrique Pena Nieto’s government to agree on that as “the treaty’s colloquial name”. The showdown over the name has pitted Lopez Obrador’s often-mocked fondness for putting thorny issues to a vote against Trump’s also-mocked fondness for renaming things.