Mexico's 'Bernie Sanders' Wins in a Huge Historic Landslide With Mandate to Reshape the Nation

Progressive anti-Trump candidate Andrés Manuel López Obrador has been elected president of Mexico on Sunday in an apparent landslide victory.

Exit polls gave AMLO, as his supporters call him,  ­a huge lead over his two closest competitors, and both of them conceded the race shortly after polls closed on Sunday night. Official results were due to be announced later on Sunday night with AMLO supporters expected to flood Mexico City’s main plaza, the Zócalo, to celebrate his anticipated victory.

The New York Times reports:

"Mr. López Obrador’s win puts a leftist leader at the helm of Latin America’s second largest economy for the first time in decades, a prospect that has filled millions of Mexicans with hope — and the nation’s elites with trepidation.

"The outcome represents a clear rejection of the status quo in the nation, which for the last quarter century has been defined by a centrist vision and an embrace of globalization that many Mexicans feel has not served them."

Journalist Gwynne Dyer, writing on Common Dreams Sunday:

"It will also annoy Washington greatly. López Obrador is promising that all 50 Mexican consulates in the United States will help to defend migrants caught up in the American legal system. "Trump and his advisers speak of the Mexicans the way Hitler and the Nazis referred to the Jews, just before undertaking the infamous persecution and the abominable extermination,” López Obrador wrote just after the Great Distractor’s election." It’s quite likely that within a year the US intelligence services will be tasked with the job of finding ways to bring him down.

 John Feffer writing on Common Dreams Friday wrote:

"AMLO is definitely the Bernie Sanders of Mexico. He was the mayor of a city, like Sanders, though Mexico City is quite a bit bigger than Burlington, Vermont. He governed in the same pragmatic way that Bernie did, often partnering with the business community. As Jon Lee Anderson writes in The New Yorker, AMLO “succeeded in creating a pension fund for elderly residents, expanding highways to ease congestion, and devising a public-private scheme, with the telecommunications magnate Carlos Slim, to restore the historic downtown.” The latter is reminiscent of Sanders’s deals to revive Burlington’s waterfront."

 The Guardian reported Sunday night:

Leading members of Latin America’s left voiced hope Amlo’s election might revive the region’s rapidly ebbing ‘pink tide’. “It will signal the return of progressive winds to Latin America!” Gleisi Hoffmann, the president of Brazil’s embattled Worker’s party, predicted. 

Brazil’s impeached former president Dilma Rousseff said an AMLO win would “not just be a victory for Mexico but for all of Latin America”. 

Argentina’s former president, Cristina Kirchner, tweeted: “Andrés Manuel López Obrador represents hope, not just for Mexico but for the entire region.”