The race for Mexico’s 2018 presidential elections has drawn zero interest in the United States so far, but it should be in the headlines. Thanks to President Trump’s fake claims about Mexico, the country may soon elect its first populist leftist president in recent memory.

The latest polls show that Trump’s Mexico bashing has had the predictable effect of creating a nationalist backlash in Mexico, which is helping leftist candidate Andres Manuel Lopez Obrador climb steadily in the polls for the July 1, 2018, election.

According to a May 6 poll by BGC Associates and the daily Excelsior, Lopez Obrador -- a former Mexico City mayor -- is leading the race with 26 percent of voters saying they would cast ballots for him, followed by center-right candidate Margarita Zavala with 21 percent and ruling party hopeful Miguel Angel Osorio Chong with 19 percent.

But the most interesting part of the poll is a chart with Mexico’s voting trends over the past 12 months. It shows a steady rise by Lopez Obrador and his Morena party, especially after the US elections last November.

Trump’s false claims about an alleged upsurge in illegal immigration from Mexico -- in fact, the number of undocumented Mexicans in the United States has fallen from 6.4 million in 2009 to 5.6 million in 2016, according to a new study by the Pew Research Center -- and other untrue assertions about Mexico have given Lopez Obrador the perfect ammunition to cast himself as the only one who can save Mexico from its aggressive northern neighbor.

Curious about Lopez Obrador’s rise in the polls, I asked former Mexican Foreign Minister Jorge Castaneda whether it’s too early to predict a Lopez Obrador victory. After all, Lopez Obrador had also led in the polls at various times in the campaigns for the 2006 and 2012 elections but didn’t win.

Castaneda responded that “there is a serious chance that, unless something unexpected happens, Lopez Obrador will win.”

Several things are converging to help Lopez Obrador’s candidacy, Castaneda told me.

Trump’s constant Mexico-bashing, Mexico’s lackluster economic performance -- in part due to a halt in investments while Trump decides what to do about his campaign pledge to scrap or re-negotiate the North American Free Trade Agreement -- and Mexican President Enrique Pena Nieto’s low popularity rates because of corruption scandals and rising violence are creating a “perfect storm” that is working in Lopez Obrador’s favor, he said.

“What Trump and his people don’t seem to understand is that, at the end of the day, the overriding US interest in Mexico for the past 100 years has been Mexico’s stability. The United States has had the extraordinary luxury of not having to worry about its southern neighbor since the days of Pancho Villa,” Castaneda said. “Trump may now change all of that by helping elect Lopez Obrador.”

Lopez Obrador told me in an interview several years ago that he had never met with late Venezuelan leader Hugo Chavez nor with Cuba’s Fidel Castro. But Lopez Obrador sounds exactly like Chavez did when he ran for office. Lopez Obrador lashes out against corruption, vows to reverse what he calls the privatization of Mexico’s oil resources, and wants to revert to Mexico’s old nationalist foreign policy.

Earlier this week, when Lopez Obrador was asked in an interview on Imagen television about the anti-government protests that have already left at least 37 dead in Venezuela, he echoed Venezuelan President Nicolas Maduro’s line of blaming opposition leaders for the deaths. Lopez Obrador called on opposition leaders to stop “sacrificing people.”

Asked about Mexico’s decision to join all major Latin American countries in officially asking Maduro to call free elections and restore Venezuela’s democratic rule, Lopez Obrador called on Mexico’s government to pursue a policy of “nonintervention” and respect for “peoples’ self-determination” -- code words used by dictatorships across the world to defend themselves from foreign criticism.

My opinion: It’s time for Trump to retract from his fake claims about Mexico, and to deactivate the political time bomb now ticking in that country, partly thanks to him. Otherwise, Trump will be responsible for helping elect an anti-American, leftist president in Mexico whose populist policies will scare away investors, make the country poorer and produce more illegal immigration and more drug trafficking across the US border.


By Andres Oppenheimer

Andres Oppenheimer is a columnist for the Miami Herald. -- Ed.


(Tribune Content Agency)