Andrés Manuel López Obrador

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Andrés Manuel López Obrador (2017)

Andrés Manuel López Obrador (born November 13, 1953 in Tepetitán , Tabasco , Mexico ), also known as AMLO , is a Mexican politician - formerly PRD , now Movimiento Regeneración Nacional (Movement of National Renewal, MORENA for short) - and acting President of Mexico .

From March 29, 2000 López Obrador was head of government ( Jefe de Gobierno ) of the federal district of Mexico City ; He is therefore colloquially referred to as the Mayor of Mexico City. He resigned from this post on July 29, 2005 to run for President of Mexico in 2006 . López Obrador ran again in the presidential elections in Mexico in 2012 and 2018 . According to the official count, Obrador lost second place as a candidate in the 2006 and 2012 elections; on July 1, 2018, he was elected President of Mexico with 53.2 percent of the vote. He took office on December 1, 2018 with his cabinet .

Life

Education and first political activities

Andrés Manuel López Obrador studied political science and public administration .

López Obrador was a long time a member of the Institutional Revolutionary Party (PRI), which was the dominant party in Mexico from 1929 to 2000 . In the party, Obrador headed the Institute for Indigenous Issues. In 1989 he was a founding member of the Democratic Revolution Party (PRD), which emerged as a left-wing split from the PRI. From 1996 to 1999 he headed the PRD.

Mayor of Mexico City

He only narrowly won the mayoral elections in Mexico City on July 2, 2000 with 38.3%. He gained a high reputation among the citizens with extensive social measures, which were intended to alleviate the greatest misery in many areas and made him the most popular politician in Mexico. So he caused u. a. giving out monthly grocery bills worth around USD 150 to the elderly and the needy, and founding a university. López Obrador also took care of the expansion of the city motorway ( Periférico Segundo Nivel ), which improved the flow of traffic.

process

On April 7, 2005, López Obrador was deprived of his immunity by the Mexican House of Representatives by the votes of the ruling PAN party and the opposition PRI . As a consequence, he resigned from his post as mayor a day later. López Obrador was the first and so far only Mexican politician whose immunity was withdrawn. He was accused of abuse of office. Despite a court order, he did not immediately stop the construction of an access road to a hospital through private property. López Obrador denies this representation and speaks of a political process against him. After Parliament's decision, hundreds of thousands took to the streets for him and accused President Vicente Fox of trying to exclude him from the presidential election. As a defendant in a subsequent court case, he would have been forbidden to participate in the presidential election regardless of a later conviction.

The situation became even more acute when López Obrador announced that he would run out of prison "for the people" if necessary. Some Mexican media saw López Obrador's attempt to stylize himself as a martyr. In response to the mass protests, on April 27, 2005, Vicente Fox dismissed Attorney General Rafael Macedo, who had brought charges against López Obrador. The proceedings against López Obrador were then dropped.

2006 presidential election

In May 2005, López Obrador officially announced that he would run in the Mexican presidential election the following year (against Roberto Madrazo and Felipe Calderón ). On July 29, 2005, he resigned from the office of mayor in order to devote himself entirely to the presidential candidacy. In polls before the election, he was considered the most promising candidate.

Immediately before the elections, the Mexican right began campaigning against Obrador and wanted to show him ties to Venezuelan President Hugo Chávez .

In the elections on July 2, 2006, none of the candidates achieved a clear majority. The narrow lead of Calderón, with 0.58% of the vote, was assessed by López Obrador and his party PRD as a result of inaccurate counting, electoral influence and, last but not least, electoral fraud ( fraude ). The state electoral commission IFE was asked by the parties to perform recounts of votes in 9% of the polling stations, which began on July 5, 2006. The results announced on July 6, 2006 confirmed the PAN's electoral success and were congruent with the first count results. The result was again rejected as manipulated by López Obrador, announcing the appeal to the Mexican Federal Electoral Court (TRIFE) to review the election. Supporters of the PRD and other parties, professors and students from various public universities (especially the UNAM ) presented several certificates that were only partially accepted by the Federal Electoral Court, but mostly rejected as "obviously inadmissible" ( notoriamente improcedente ) without further explanation. Immediately after the election, the international election observers described the elections as largely unremarkable.

López Obrador went on to call himself the legitimate president and moral winner of the presidential election. Since mid-July 2006 he has called his supporters to meetings in the Zócalo . López Obrador always urged peaceful resistance to the election result and called for all ballot papers to be recounted. From July 31 to September 15, 2006, López Obrador and some supporters of the PRD will occupy one of the most important arteries of the metropolis, the Paseo de la Reforma . Although federal assembly laws prohibit this, the incumbent mayor, also PRD, did not intervene. 53 tent settlements were built. The aim was to use the pressure of the street to urge the federal electoral court to recount all 42 million votes ( Voto por voto, casilla por casilla , German: "Vote for vote, polling station for polling station"). This was not only unsuccessful, López Obrador turned many of his own supporters against him with the concept of creating even more disability and chaos in a mega-metropolis that is suffocated by traffic chaos every day.

On August 5, 2006, the Federal Electoral Court announced that only those urns should be reopened and counted if the representatives of the political parties had reported doubts about the correctness of the count in a timely and bureaucratically correct manner . This was possible during the counting on election day and again for a week afterwards. The PRD mostly failed to raise doubts in a timely manner and thus exhaust existing democratic means. Between August 9 and 14, less than 10% of the urns were re-counted. On August 29, the electoral court rejected most of the complaints against the election results and declared Felipe Calderón the winner of the presidential election on September 5. The PRD parliamentarians wanted to prevent Felipe Calderón from being sworn in by occupying the lectern in parliament. But PAN parliamentarians got ahead of them with an occupation on their part. On the day of the swearing-in, there were brawls and aggression in the Mexican parliament. Opposition MPs lashed out, threw armchairs and tried to block the doors to the meeting room.

2012 presidential election

At the beginning of June 2012, López Obrador ran again in the Mexican presidential election , but lost as a representative of the PRD to Enrique Peña Nieto ( PRI ). López Obrador, who was in second place, then filed a complaint with the National Electoral Authority (IFE) because the election had broken the constitution several times and the opposing side had bought votes on a large scale. The electoral authority then announced on July 4, 2012 that the ballot papers from 54.5% of the urns would be counted again. López Obrador, however, demanded a complete recount and stated that there were "inconsistencies" in more than 113,000 of the 143,000 ballot boxes.

2018 presidential election and Obrador cabinet

On his third candidacy for the presidency, López Obrador changed his strategy and cultivated a moderate center-left discourse. He pursued a " Noah's Ark " policy: he offered refuge in his party and allied with various influential people to all former political opponents who had not been nominated as candidates by their own parties or who wanted to leave their parties in the face of the expected defeat Actors in Mexican Politics. In the electoral alliance “Juntos Hacemos Historia” (Together we make history), three ideologically very different parties formed a coalition: López Obrador's left party MORENA, the socialist Partido del Trabajo (PT) and the ultra-conservative Partido Encuentro Social (PES).

Furthermore, two former union leaders, who were also criticized as corrupt and still powerful: Elba Esther Gordillo, once chairman of the Sindicato Nacional de Trabajadores de la Educación (SNTE) teachers 'union , and Napoleón Gómez Urrutia, once chairman of the Sindicato Nacional de Trabajadores Mineros Mineros workers' union Metalúrgicos y Similares de la República Mexicana (SNTMMSRM).

López Obrador won the federal elections in Mexico in 2018 with 53.2% of the vote. The coalition parties contributed the following proportions of votes: MORENA 44.5%, PT 6.0% and PES 2.7%.

He heads the Obrador cabinet .

Voters' hopes lie in the elucidation of numerous human rights violations in Mexico, such as the mass kidnapping in Iguala in 2014 . Carola Hausotter from the German Human Rights Coordination Network attests to progress under Obrador; he convened a truth commission on the case, which is mainly composed of lawyers and representatives of human rights organizations, the state and family members. However, the investigation is difficult, as politicians and the military continue to hinder an investigation. The human rights organization Comité Cerezo noted a decline in repression under Obrador's efforts at the beginning of 2020, but considerable problems persist due to the traditionally deep involvement of state agencies in crimes; the number of politically motivated murders has only decreased slightly despite Obrador's measures.

The fight against corruption also affects the state-owned oil company Pemex , the former Pemex boss Emilio Lozoya was arrested in 2020. The investigators assume that funds were deliberately diverted from the company via a corruption network. The large-scale projects planned by the Mexican government that will affect the local population are sometimes controversial. The Obrador government commissioned the restructuring of the loss-making state-owned company Pemex to build a new oil refinery in the state of Tabasco , with the aim of increasing productivity and reducing oil imports. However, due to the low oil price and the production of oil, instead of investing in the increased promotion of renewable energies, this decision met with opposition from environmental policy actors. Contrary to the government's instructions, the company then cut down parts of a mangrove forest in the area of ​​the planned refinery, which led to additional requirements from the environmental agency ASEA, but according to the Quartz website, tougher action against violations is unlikely, since a move to renewable energies is not in the focus of the government.

Political positions

Politically, López Obrador is part of the new Latin American left.

After his election as President of Mexico in 2018, he announced that he would fight corruption and impunity in the country. He wants to support the socially disadvantaged and put their concerns on the political agenda, but there will be no expropriations. The private sector would also remain untouched. He wanted to look for a friendly relationship with the USA. López also advocates the legalization of cannabis and, after his election victory in 2018, launched a corresponding bill.

family

AMLO has been married to Beatriz Gutiérrez Müller for the second time since 2006 , with whom he has a son, Jesús Ernesto (* 2007). From his first marriage he has three children with his first wife Rocío Beltrán Medina, who died in 2003 due to illness.

literature

Web links

Commons : Andrés Manuel López Obrador  - Album with pictures, videos and audio files
 Wikinews: Andrés Manuel López Obrador  - in the news

Reports in advance of the process

Reports on the 2006 election

Individual evidence

  1. ↑ López Obrador announces a "radical" turnaround Der Tagesspiegel , December 1, 2018, accessed on December 1, 2018.
  2. ↑ a b c Rocío Bravo Salazar: Presidential Elections 2018 in Mexico: Crisis of Political Institutions and Rise of Populism (= Ibero-Analyzes, Issue 30). Ibero-American Institute, Berlin 2018, ISBN 978-3-935656-71-9 , p. 6.
  3. ↑ Election results page, digitized on web.archives.org, accessed on July 2, 2018
  4. ↑ http://www.jornada.unam.mx/2006/08/23/index.php
  5. ↑ Election result in Mexico: Left-wing politician Obrador wants to contest election result at focus.de, July 3, 2012 (accessed on July 3, 2012).
  6. ↑ Election of the President in Mexico: Half of all ballot papers are counted anew at focus.de, July 5, 2012 (accessed on July 5, 2012).
  7. ↑ Franziska Pröll: Iguala: "Many people say that Mexico is one single mass grave". In: zeit.de . September 27, 2019, accessed May 21, 2020 .
  8. ^ A b Philipp Gerber: Mexico: Savior in the stress test. In: amerika21. January 15, 2020, accessed May 21, 2020 .
  9. ^ Christoph Gurk, Frederik Obermaier, Buenos Aires / Münc: Access in the noble quarter . In: sueddeutsche.de . February 13, 2020, accessed May 21, 2020 .
  10. ↑ NGO proposes killing refinery project, says it has 2% chance of success , mexiconewsdaily, April 9, 2019
  11. ↑ a b Mexico is illegally destroying protected mangrove trees to build an $ 8 billion oil refinery , Quartz , March 5, 2020
  12. ^ Mexico: Left nationalist López Obrador wins presidential election . In: Spiegel Online . July 2, 2018 ( spiegel.de [accessed July 2, 2018]).
  13. ↑ Bill launched in Mexico to legalize cannabis. Ärzteblatt, November 7, 2018, accessed November 22, 2019 .
  14. ↑ Marijuana legal soon? FAZ, November 7, 2018, accessed on November 22, 2019 .
  15. ↑ Todo lo que tienes que saber sobre Beatriz Gutiérrez Müller (Spanish; article from December 2, 2018)
personal data
SURNAME López Obrador, Andrés Manuel
BRIEF DESCRIPTION Mexican politician
DATE OF BIRTH November 13, 1953
PLACE OF BIRTH Tepetitán, Tabasco (Mexico)