López Obrador and his party, the National Regeneration Movement (MORENA), swept the election as predicted in polls, taking the presidency, 52 seats in the Senate, and 210 seats in the Chamber of Deputies, the lower house of Mexico's congress, winning with a majority in all cases. As Puryear predicted on Friday, voting tendencies followed what the polls had predicted.
Morena won a whopping 70 percent of votes in the lower house.
"I think Morena and the coalition they built spoke to the complete and total bankruptcy of the other parties," Puryear told By Any Means Necessary hosts Sean Blackmon and Bob Schlehuber, "including the [Party of the Democratic Revolution], which have become extremely corrupt and have backed… the neoliberal turn in the post-NAFTA era that have driven income inequality… bringing the military in in terms of the drug war issue that has heavily, heavily escalated the level of violence, being involved in a number of suspect situations including the killing of the 43 students in Ayotzinapa."
"Just the inability to have any real sort of answer to the destruction of traditional Mexican agriculture by many of the NAFTA policies," and the aforementioned issues "tied in" to a heavily corrupt government, drove Mexicans to vote in favor of Morena, Puryear said.
López Obrador spoke to those issues, Puryear notes, and he was set apart from other candidates by his lack of a corrupt reputation.
"Now, this election will be another historical change [in Mexico], which is throwing out these corrupt political parties. I think that people viewed any change — positive, negative, left, center, right — many people of various hues knew that no real change could happen unless this corruption — as López Obrador called them, power mafias — were stripped of their political power," Puryear said.
The president-elect campaigned on the promise of divorcing the oligarchical and political classes ruling the country, characterizing himself not as a socialist or leftist but as a "radical" capable of shaking up the establishment.
In López Obrador's victory speech, he said he would form a government that would not service just a minority but would work for all citizens.
"We will respect everyone," he said, "but we will give preference to the most humble and forgotten."
"There will be a push" by Morena to "enshrine more basic social rights and social dignities for working people," Puryear said. The Radio Sputnik host noted that "food sovereignty" and "rolling back the privatization of certain things and really stopping new privatization in terms of water and the like — and also getting rid of a very hated reform of education" that has caused massive protests since 2015 — will be at the top of the new government's agenda.
