This is the Cato Daily Podcast for Friday, May 24th, 2019.

I'm Caleb Brown.

Populism in Mexico has come roaring back

as a new president there attempts to raise

living standards while simultaneously pledging to militarize the National

Guard to bring down the murder rate.

Cato adjunct scholar Roberto Salinas Leon is president of the Mexico Business Forum.

The populism of today I think is much more a function of what Fukuyama has called identity and the politics of resentment.

There is certainly an identity issue or an us versus them issue of those political classes and that segment of society that felt disenfranchised

and that got completely fed up with the political establishment,

especially after the former administration of Enrica Peyanito succumbed to a vicious cycle of impunity and just outright corruption and everywhere

from the construction of pipelines to the assignment of credits to all kinds of crony arrangements with different

corporations for public works projects and and many other such cases that

that seem to reconfirm the fears that Andres Manuel Lopez-Orador had

exploited in former presidential campaigns that he had that he had engaged in.

Exploited the fears that this was corrupt and this was against the public and this was the rich versus the poor the us

versus them the bad guys the neoliberal's and the conservatives versus the noble and

just peoples of Mexico.

And the vote was overwhelming.

Last 1 July of 2018, Lopez-Overador won incredibly with a majority.

This had been unheard of in Mexico's nascent democratic transition because it's always been a three-party

system, fundamentally a three-party system.

...