Andrés Manuel López Obrador

Biography

Andrés Manuel López Obrador was born in 1953 in Tepetitán, Tabasco, to a family of shopkeepers. He studied political science and public administration at the National Autonomous University of Mexico from 1973, interrupting his studies for political work and finishing his degree in 1987. He began his career in the Institutional Revolutionary Party in 1976, directing the Indigenous Institute of Tabasco, but left in 1989 for the new Party of the Democratic Revolution, whose national president he was from 1996 to 1999.

Elected head of government of Mexico City in 2000, he became popular for his social spending and public works. An attempt to strip his immunity over a land dispute in 2004-2005 failed to keep him off the ballot, and he lost the 2006 presidential election narrowly to Felipe Calderón, refusing to accept the result and leading mass protests. He ran again in 2012 and lost to Enrique Peña Nieto.

He founded the National Regeneration Movement (Morena) in 2011 and left the PRD in 2012 to build it into a party. Leading the Juntos Haremos Historia coalition, he won the 2018 election by a landslide and was president from December 2018 to September 2024. His government introduced social reforms and renewed public investment in sectors opened up by earlier governments, while critics faulted his handling of COVID-19 and of the drug cartels and accused him of contributing to democratic backsliding. He was succeeded by Claudia Sheinbaum and withdrew from public life.