President Donald Trump says he called Mexican President-elect Andrés Manuel López Obrador Monday and spoke for 30 minutes about trade, border security and the fate of the North American Free Trade Agreement.
Although Trump has railed against Mexico since his campaign, the U.S. president said he came away upbeat after the talk with his incoming counterpart.
"I think the relationship will be a very good one," Trump said, during a meeting with the prime minister of the Netherlands.
López Obrador later said on Twitter their half-hour call was "respectful," and that he raised the idea of development projects to create jobs in Mexico, help reduce migration and improve safety. The Mexican politician is known to criticize the U.S. president, including in a book he published last year called "Oye, Trump" ("Listen Up, Trump").
López Obrador, a leftist populist, celebrated an overwhelming victory in Sunday's vote, pledging to stamp out Mexico's corrosive corruption and rampant violence, while helping the poor and working class.
That puts López Obrador in the history books. His win is the biggest election vote percentage of any president since the 1990s. Not only did his 4-year-old Morena party take the presidency, the party and its allies also look like they will capture a majority in the lower house, another first in modern Mexican politics. The coalition also grabbed as many as five governorships. Since Mexico began its democratic opening in the late 1990s, no Mexican president has gained such a broad electoral mandate.
Analysts say most Mexicans chose a new party and expressed their anger at leading establishment parties that have swapped power for decades without solving problems like corruption, crime and inequality.
"Let's elect the principal opposition leader and, you know, let's give him enough power to gather enough political capital to push through a new agenda," says Carlos Bravo Regidor, who heads the journalism department at Mexico's Center for Research and Teaching in Economics, known by the Spanish initials CIDE.
At a polling place Sunday in Ecatepec, a poor suburb outside Mexico City, voter Mario Ruiz Bacera, echoed that sentiment. He said he not only voted for but also for every other candidate running on the Morena ticket. "You have to give him the whole car or they'll just put the brakes on his agenda," Ruiz said.
His critics long have warned he is a leftist firebrand who will spell big trouble for Latin America's second-largest economy, with Venezuela-style socialist policies.
In his speeches, the leader — commonly known by his acronym nickname "AMLO" — has consistently assailed elites he considers the "mafia of power." He pledges to audit foreign energy contracts reached under outgoing President Enrique Peña Nieto and to review any future ones.
But López Obrador, who will assume office in December, has tempered his message on some issues in his third presidential run. He says he will not nationalize companies. And while he used to vow to pull out of the North American Free Trade Agreement or NAFTA, now he says he will try to keep it.
"The new government will maintain fiscal and monetary discipline," López Obrador told supporters packed into a downtown hotel ballroom.
Minutes later, the president-elect added that he will double pensions for the elderly, give education scholarships to the young and aid the disabled.
And he repeated what he called his basic political tenet: "We will provide for the good of everyone, but the poor come first."
The incoming president has a lot of different sectors of society to satisfy.
To get elected this time, after failed presidential runs in 2006 and 2012, López Obrador reached out to a disparate group of political interests — from veteran leftists and labor unionists to staunchly conservative evangelical Christians.
He will also have to balance Mexico's precarious relations with the United States and its president. That will be a difficult task, says Bravo Regidor of CIDE. He says that the president-elect at heart is an economic nationalist. "That doesn't mean that he is against NAFTA or anti-globalization or anti-American. It just means that he is aware of the fact that NAFTA hasn't been all roses and rainbows for Mexico," says Bravo Regidor.
López Obrador insists he will be a tough negotiator with Trump and will get the respect from the U.S. president that his predecessor couldn't.
Eric Olson, deputy director of the Latin American Program at the Wilson Center in Washington, D.C., says Mexico's next president is in a tricky spot when it comes to balancing relations with the U.S. and appeasing critics at home.
"He has to walk the fine line between those who want a more assertive approach to Donald Trump and the pragmatic need to continue cooperation," Olson says.
What's more, if Mexico's incoming president is to fulfill his primary campaign pledge to crack down on corruption, Olson adds, he'll need U.S. intelligence and cooperation to make that a reality.
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