According to some of my Mexican friends, Andres Manuel Lopez-Obrador, the man from the left, will be the next president of Mexico.
They tell me that he has great public support.
Frankly, I don’t know. I think that it is very hard to analyze Mexican public opinion.
Yet, my question is this: Does Lopez-Obrador want to be President of Mexico? Does he want to become the most unpopular person in Mexico?
Let me give you a preview of the early days of a Lopez-Obrador’s presidency.
If elected in July, Mexico will have a summer of huge capital flight. It will remind every one of August ’82 or November ’94.
By the fall and winter of 2018, the peso’s value will drop as Mexicans panic and take their money out of the country.
President LO will respond by saying that he is not as bad as his populism indicates. He will assure investors that his “populist words” were just campaign rhetoric intended to get votes rather than a reflection of how he will govern.
Foreign investors won’t buy it. Dollars will flow out of rather than into Mexico!
Mexicans won’t buy it either. There will be more and more people trying to cross the US-Mexico border.
With a de-facto peso devaluation and zero confidence from foreign investors, LO won’t have a lot of options to deal with Mexico’s problems.
So my advice to LO is this: Don’t win.
Let one of the other candidates govern Mexico.
I’m not suggesting that the other guys have all of the answers but they inspire more confidence.
PS: You can listen to my show (Canto Talk) and follow me on Twitter.
