The Ruin and Renewal of Mexican Economic Nationalism

With Mexican president-elect Claudia Sheinbaum’s recent victory all over recent press, many are remarking on the continued surge of left-wing politics below the U.S. southern border. Sheinbaum is predicted to expand on several policies implemented by her predecessor and confrère Andrés López Manuel Obrador, including those associated with a loose programme of economic nationalism. I recently wrote about the revival, or rather reinvention, of that platform among Mexican leftists since the decline of the Institutional Revolutionary Party (Partido Revolucionario Institucional, or PRI) and its neoliberal peers. In the last century, Mexico shifted from a postrevolutionary regime of developmentalism hinged on public-sector spending to a neoliberal one of privatization and marketization reforms. The pendulum seems to be swinging back: this time informed by more recent developments under NAFTA and USMCA. See the digital version of my editorial here, pp. 143–54.