A debate of sorts broke out last week at the Three Amigos (Canada, the United States and Mexico) joint press conference between Presidents Trudeau, Enrique Peña Nieto and Barack Obama over the concept of populism.
It took Trudeau and Obama somewhat as a surprise to hear Peña Nieto warn them about “populist and demagogue” that seeks to destroy what others have built in the past.
It also took journalists by surprise as to whom Peña Nieto was referring to, and one reporter asked if he meant Donald Trump who wants to build a tall wall at the Mexican border, or perhaps he was talking about Hitler or Mussolini.
Peña Nieto, who speaks English well enough, opted to speak Spanish and through an interpreter he warned about the appearance of “political actors and political leaderships that assume populist and demagogic positions, intending to eliminate or destroy what has been built in the past, what has taken decades to build, in order to reinstate problems of the past.”
Of course for all foreigners, Peña Nieto was speaking in terms of symbolic terminology, but Mexicans who have followed his tirades against “populists” know exactly not what, but who he is talking about.
By now, Peña Nieto’s to attacks on “populist leaders” has become an obsession. The speech he pronounced at the Three Amigos press conference was similar almost verbatim to the speech he delivered at the United Nations General Assembly (UNGA) last September 28, 2015 bashing populists.
Most Mexican observers know that the “populist demagogue” Peña Nieto is referring to is none other than his bitter political foe and presidential race contender Andrés Manuel López Obrador (AMLO) who at present is the runner up in all polls to be the next president of Mexico in the 2018 elections.
But since Peña Nieto never mentions AMLO by name, but with generalities as he also did at the UNGA — a speech that for the most part passed unnoticed for its irrelevance to the issues then at hand — President Obama took up the issue during the press conference nearly 20 minutes after Peña Nieto had mentioned it.
Obama warned Peña Nieto to be careful when using this term and explained his understanding of it.
“I worry about poor people who are working hard and don’t have the chance to advance. And I worry about workers being capable of having a collective voice in their work team. I want to make sure the children are receiving a decent education and I believe in having a fair taxation system.”
“I suppose that makes me a populist,” Obama told the stunned Peña Nieto.
In fact, President Obama at that point even read that perhaps Peña Nieto was referring, again, to Donald Trump and even Bernie Sanders, both of whom, from the extreme left and the extreme right, meet ideologically at the end of a circle, particularly on foreign trade.
Bernie Sanders, Obama said, “genuinely” deserves the title of being a populist.
Unfortunately Peña Nieto never clarified his thought because in Mexican political speech when you accuse someone of some criminal endeavor, such as being a populist, you take for granted that everyone is a Mexican political pundit that reads between the lines.
Obama is not a Mexican political pundit and probably until this day does not know that Peña Nieto was referring to AMLO who has always been described by his political contenders as “a threat to Mexico” for his allegedly radical ideals.
At the UN last year, the president of Mexico tried to bring discredit to AMLO but without ever saying his name nor mentioning why he represents a threat to the country while being a bona fide candidate who ended as the runner up in two presidential elections.
Whether AMLO — a moderate socialist whose main goal is seeking honesty in government, which AMLO says Peña Nieto hasn’t got — is a threat or not remains to be seen.
But what would be fair to listeners would be for President Peña Nieto to talk straight forward and not use the traditional double lingo of Mexican politics of reading between the lines, particularly to those who can’t read between the lines.
Obama was nearly offended by Peña Nieto’s tirade against populists but, neither Obama nor the UN listeners ever knew what President Peña was talking about.
Fear of AMLO? You bet!
