The national-popular discourse of Andrés Manuel López Obrador (2018-2020)

Abstract

The so-called left turn, in the first decade of the 21st century in the Latin American area, restructured the populist discourses in the political map of this region. Mexico arrived late to the left-wing populist wave, since it happened until the democratic rise of the political party MORENA and its leader Andrés Manuel López Obrador, who takes office in 2018 in a context where the right is strengthening in Latin America. From an analysis of the discourses of the President of Mexico, Andrés Manuel López Obrador, in the period 2018-2020, we observe the conditions of possibility of the construction of a popular-national discourse, which seeks to articulate, in an hegemonic way, a new way to make politics with his discourse of rejection and criticism of the «corrupt political elite» and the neoliberal ideology in Mexico. Taking as a frame of reference the concepts of the “national-popular” of Gramsci (1986), and Portantiero and De Ípola (1981) and the “populist discourse” of Laclau (2010), we present a first advance of our research, pointing out that the national-popular is the distinctive feature of the populist discourse of the President of Mexico, through which he configures his political project named by himself “the Fourth Transformation of Mexico”.