LatAm in Focus: Why the Right Hasn’t Risen in Mexico—Yet
LatAm in Focus: Why the Right Hasn’t Risen in Mexico—Yet
Journalist Alex González Ormerod and historian Gema Kloppe-Santamaría cover why Mexico hasn’t joined Latin America’s rightward tilt and what could change.
Across Latin America, the political right is on the march. From El Salvador to Argentina, voters have backed right-wing leaders, several of whom are allied with President Donald Trump’s Make American Great Again movement in the United States.
And then there’s Mexico. The largest Spanish-speaking country in the world remains firmly in the hands of Morena, a left-wing party, and its popular president, Claudia Sheinbaum.
One reason is that the governing party has succeeded at bringing conservatives into its fold. "What Morena has been able to accomplish ... is to accommodate these different practices and ideologies that tend to be associated with right-wing movements," explains Gema Kloppe-Santamaría. Plus, forming alliances with international right-wing movements is no recipe for success in Mexico, she explains. “Mexico traditionally, historically has been a very nationalistic country, so the right is having a lot of trouble selling a pro-U.S. discourse in this era of Trump.”
Dr. Kloppe-Santamaría, a historian and sociologist at the University College Cork, joined the podcast for a conversation with journalist and author Alex González Ormerod. These two experts talked with host Carin Zissis about how a century-old religious war still weighs on Mexico’s right, why the traditional conservative party known as the PAN has failed to stage a comeback, and the reasons it’s so hard for a new right-wing party to gain ground in Mexico.
“Anything starting from scratch has basically no way of doing it because it's a bit like a graduate looking for a job: You need loads of experience to get the job, but you haven't got any experience,” says González Ormerod. “And it's the same with the parties. You need loads of machinery and you need loads of capital, but the only way you can legally get capital and the machinery going is by already being a party...It's an incumbent--reproducing machine.”
That doesn’t mean right-wing leaders haven’t tried to break ground. The ultra-Catholic conservative Eduardo Verástegui, who brought CPAC to Mexico, made a failed bid to run as an independent in 2024. And the name of one man has been making the rounds as a potential opposition figure: libertarian business leader and media mogul Ricardo Salinas Pliego.
Our guests
Alex González Ormerod is director and founder of The Mexico Political Economist, covering Mexican politics and policy for a global audience. He is the author of the new book La derecha no existe (pero ahí está), which explores the state of the Mexican right today. A journalist, González Ormerod has edited and written for publications such as Americas Quarterly, TIME, Whitepaper, Rest of World, and Nexos.
Gema Kloppe-Santamaría is a lecturer of Sociology at the University College Cork and an associate research professor of Latin American history at the George Washington University. She is the author of the book In the Vortex of Violence: Lynching, Extralegal Justice, and the State in Post-Revolutionary Mexico, and was lead editor on two books exploring violence in Latin America. In addition to other fellowships and published work, Kloppe-Santamaría has authored specialized reports for various international institutions and is a collaborator with Noria Research’s Mexico & Central America Program.
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