Photo Via Bloomberg
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Mexico elected its first woman president last year, Claudia Sheinbaum, continuing the political dominance of the MORENA Party. Outside Mexico, much of the international coverage centered on the symbolism. The unmatched historic victory of a woman becoming president in a nation long marked by machismo and political violence. Inside Mexico, however, people were focused on whether MORENA would continue to safeguard and uplift its people.
MORENA is an acronym that stands for the Movimiento de Regeneración Nacional. Its rise is the story of a population long frustrated with entrenched corruption, low social mobility, and state indifference. PRI politics consisted of repeated promises of helping the disadvantaged poor, then left them with violence, stagnation, and precarity. MORENA built its identity on the belief that a different social contract was possible. The state should be able to redistribute national wealth and restore dignity to the communities that political elites had extracted from for decades.
The triumph of representation—and the expansion of welfare—exists within a brutal contradiction. The party is striving towards progress without physical safety. Mexico today lives inside that paradox. MORENA expanded the social floor, but the country has seen record violence, organized criminal consolidation, and historic levels of political assassination in the same years. The people who most need the protection of the state are often the same citizens who now negotiate daily life within cartel-controlled territory.
The tension between rising crime and expanding social programs is one that the party must confront. The movement that promised to restore the people must now prove it can protect them from crime. Historically, Mexican politics has had cycles of widespread uplift and centralized control. After declaring independence in 1821, the country swung between emperors, caudillos, and unstable republics—elites constantly claimed they were “saving the nation” on behalf of the pueblo, while excluding them from meaningful power. The Porfiriato in the late 1800s and early 1900s modernized the economy at the cost of authoritarian concentration of power. Porfirio Diaz’s regime suppressed opposition and prioritized elite industrial expansion.
The Mexican Revolution (1910–1920) was the direct response to that betrayal. Leaders like Emiliano Zapata and Pancho Villa demanded land, labor, and sovereignty for the poor and the indigenous. Nevertheless, even reformist institutions later produced new forms of exclusion. From 1929 to 2000, the Institutional Revolutionary Party (PRI) held power in Mexico. President Lázaro Cárdenas implemented significant reforms, including agrarian redistribution, nationalization of oil, and state-led industrial growth. Despite this, the PRI maintained its political control through corporatist structures, union co-optation, and party-picked presidential succession. Elections existed, but their outcomes were predetermined.
MORENA enters the historical lineage of one-party rule. Populism is not the exception in Mexico. Instead, it is a recurring response when the public loses faith in institutions. MORENA inherits both the demands of the pueblo and the burden of breaking the historical cycle of centralization and insecurity. To move to the present day, MORENA was founded in 2011 by former President Andrés Manuel López Obrador (AMLO). It emerged as a reaction to the corruption scandals, neoliberal reforms, and declining trust in the PRI and PRD. MORENA spoke directly to ordinary Mexicans, promising a rupture from decades of elite enrichment and weak state capacity.
The party expanded social transfers dramatically. During AMLO’s administration, programs such as universal senior pensions and increased cash transfers reached millions of households. According to Mexico’s National Council for the Evaluation of Social Development Policy, cash transfer programs contributed to a reduction in extreme poverty, from 49.9% in 2018 to 43.5% in 2022. The success of these programs matters. They show the Mexican state can expand the social floor.
In 2019, AMLO’s administration introduced the Banco del Bienestar (BdB), which introduced formal financial products closer to marginalized Mexican Citizens. Policy institutions, such as the Reach Alliance, note that expanding basic access to a single formal financial product enables opportunities. Although the implementation has not translated to full economic mobility, these programs are a step in the right direction. MORENA has also created a culture of direct presidential communication. AMLO’s daily press conferences became a political ritual; Sheinbaum continues them and has attempted to make them more technically grounded. This direct channel bypasses traditional intermediaries, reinforcing the populist frame: the leader speaks directly to the people, not through political elites.
MORENA’s social vision has sparked raised expectations. Citizens are invigorated to believe that redistribution is politically possible in Mexico. For many, this alone was transformative enough to trust them with continued power. MORENA faces its most significant test in terms of institutional security.
Despite welfare expansion, MORENA governs a country experiencing extraordinary levels of violence. Over López Obrador’s six-year term, more than 175,000 people were murdered, and over 43,000 were reported missing. While homicide rates are not solely attributable to any single administration, many have not ignored the scale of violence since MORENA took power.
Local politics is now one of the deadliest occupations in Mexico. Carlos Manzo, mayor of Uruapan, was murdered on November 1st, 2025. Other officials, such as council leaders and candidates, are routinely assassinated. Cartels eliminate those who try to interfere with their economic territory. These organizations govern entire regions through informal agreements between local governments and criminal organizations. In some states, the cartel functions as the primary provider of “justice,” dispute resolution, and enforcement—filling gaps where the state is absent or unwilling to act. Past Mexican administrations have had to deal with their organized crime problem, but it has become ever more prominent under a party promising social change.
The contradiction between social change and organized crime is one that the MORENA government must confront directly. Mexico cannot claim to be advancing social mobility if the state cannot protect the basic life of its own citizens, nor can welfare gains flourish in a political environment where speaking against criminal power is effectively a death sentence. Critics argue that MORENA’s reluctance to confront cartels more aggressively has functioned as a form of tacit appeasement. The government has emphasized avoiding direct war-style confrontation, but in practice, this has allowed organized crime to consolidate territorial power over more municipalities, infrastructure, extortion markets, and smuggling routes. If the party promises to protect the people, then it must address the most urgent threat to them.
Image Via El Pais
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MORENA’s dominance persists because the old parties remain deeply discredited. PRI and PAN continue to struggle to present credible alternatives after decades of corruption and economic mismanagement. MORENA filled a leadership vacuum that the establishment created. Voters genuinely believed that there were few viable alternatives capable of bringing about meaningful change.
MORENA won through free and fair elections. Its electoral mandate is a genuine reflection of the public’s desire for social programs, not a passive continuation of one-party authoritarianism. However, consolidating national authority during a period of surging cartel governance carries unique dilemmas. Populist movements flourish during institutional crises; the same crisis can also consume them if reforms lack the power to enforce them. The public’s faith in MORENA ultimately hinges on its capacity. Redistribution without security will not fulfill that faith.
For Mexico to realize the promise of its populist mandate, national security and social progress must advance together. Policymakers must professionalize police forces, strengthen judicial independence, and meaningfully protect local officials. The National Guard, recently created during AMLO’s administration, must be supported, reformed where needed, and insulated against politicization. Mexico also needs fundamental strategies for dismantling cartel recruitment pipelines. It must provide alternatives to violence through strong wage protections and the expansion of formal employment and union protections. MORENA must modernize its labor market and continue expanding access to education.
Modernizing national industry, managing debt, controlling inflation, and preventing elite capture of new public investment are also central to long-term stability. Mexico needs to build institutions that can outlive AMLO, Sheinbaum, and MORENA itself. That is the actual difference between a fleeting populist cycle and a durable democratic turning point.
MORENA’s legacy carries a change in symbolism and representation. The party has changed the expectation of what the Mexican state can provide. It will only be remembered as transformational if it can guarantee that progress is not constantly held hostage by criminal power.
Mexico is at a turning point. The country has experienced one-party dominance before, and it has also witnessed broken promises of uplift. The people have chosen MORENA because they do not want to surrender to despair. Fulfilling that hope requires confronting the violent forces that undermine the possibility of collective safety, shared economic thriving, and democratic stability.
MORENA permitted Mexico to dream again. Now it must deliver the protection necessary to make those dreams a reality.
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This article was edited by Abigail D’Angelo
Kathryn Amend 
John Virgil Aton 
Catherine Topps