AMY GOODMAN: This is Democracy Now!, democracynow.org, The War and Peace Report. I’m Amy Goodman, with Juan González.

Mexico is making history today as it inaugurates its first woman president. Claudia Sheinbaum, climate scientist, Mexico City’s former mayor, won a landslide victory in Mexico’s June elections. Sheinbaum is a member of the ruling Morena party, a close ally of outgoing Mexican President Andrés Manuel López Obrador, whose six-year term ended last night at midnight.

AMLO, as he’s widely known, leaves behind a complicated legacy as Mexico’s most popular president in decades. He’s been championed as an ally of Mexico’s poorest communities, with policies that increased the minimum wage, strengthened labor and union rights.

AMLO’s critics say he’s eroded democratic oversight in Mexico, where his recent enactment of a contested judicial reform was met with protest. AMLO says the reform would crack down on corruption in courts, but critics argue the plan could threaten judicial independence. AMLO has also been accused of failing to significantly address violence in Mexico, including the murder of journalists and rising femicides. Meanwhile, Indigenous leaders denounced AMLO’s completion of the ambitious Tren Maya project, a 1,000-mile railway that cuts through the Yucatán Peninsula, causing deforestation and environmental destruction.

For more, we’re joined here in New York by Edwin Ackerman, sociology professor at Syracuse University. His recent piece for Jacobin is headlined “AMLO’s War on Neoliberal Corruption.”

So, today is the first day of Mexican President Claudia Sheinbaum’s presidency; last night, the last moment of AMLO’s presidency. Can you talk about the significance of both, Professor Ackerman?

EDWIN ACKERMAN: Yeah. This is a historic moment on many accounts. As you were mentioning, first woman president in the country, but also coming in with a very clear mandate, having won, as you mentioned, the election overwhelmingly, her party having secured a two-thirds majority in Congress and, basically, close to doing so — one short of doing so in the Senate, which is an increasing, I think, anomaly in Western democracies at least, that are at this point sort of accustomed to political stalemate. What we have here is a very strong president at the beginning of her term, who campaigned on continuity with the previous administration.

JUAN GONZÁLEZ: And, Edwin Ackerman, could you talk about AMLO’s legacy? Here’s a man who tripled the minimum wage, doubled old-age pensions, lifted millions out of poverty, but yet there is a lot of criticism of him, especially in the Western media.

EDWIN ACKERMAN: Yeah, that’s right. I mean, I think we could characterize the legacy in three respects. I’ll try and be brief here. But one is, as you were mentioning some of these elements, the return, I would say, of class politics, which takes the form of a series of important legislative measure that includes raising the minimum wage, facilitating the formation of unions, but also more specific things like, for example, recognizing the labor rights of domestic workers for the first time in the country. And this has produced very clear results that are increasingly incontrovertible. We have a 30% increase in the real wages of the average worker. The laborers’ share of income over the past six years has moved in favor of labor for the first time in decades. And the spending capacity of the bottom 10% of the population has increased by almost 100%. And this has meant, depending on the calculations, about 9 million people lifted out of poverty. This has meant at the same time that there’s an increasing, really clear voter realignment going on, in which increasingly the working classes, particularly the peasantry, the employees and the informal sector, are the basis of support of the party, and increasingly the business sector and certain sectors of the professional and middle classes are sort of moving away from its support.

The second important element, I think, of his legacy is a return of the state, which takes also several forms. One, perhaps the most well-known one, is the series of major infrastructure projects that ranges from the train that was being mentioned earlier here to refineries, airports, transportation corridors, etc., producing a lot of regional development, a lot of work, public works and so forth. There’s also an effort to recentralize a series of previously outsourced government functions. And there’s also, as you were mentioning, this slate of social programs that, in short, are different ways of — different sort of universal cash transfer programs — that is, not means-tested cash transfer programs — that are hugely popular here, at least successful during his time there. And this has all been part of what I would call a progressive reframing of anti-corruption politics that thinks of neoliberalism itself as a form of corruption — I’m happy to talk a bit more about that later on.

But yeah, there are concerns that different camps have raised. You know, some of these concerns are raised, as you would imagine, by sort of knee-jerk critics of AMLO, members of the opposition parties and allies and so forth. But there are also, I think, types of critiques that have a certain legitimacy, in my personal opinion. Two that I would mention here are the way in which the military has been empowered over the past six years. Many of these infrastructure projects are actually managed, constructed and designed by the military. And I’m happy to talk about why that’s the case. But it is — the bottom line is that there has been a process of military empowerment in the past years. And there’s also increasing environmental concerns, particularly in the project to revamp the state-owned oil company and the obvious tension between fomenting the increase of fossil fuels under the objective of national energy sovereignty and the looming climate crisis.

JUAN GONZÁLEZ: And could you talk also, in terms of the criticism, especially from other countries, of the judicial reform? What’s your sense of that?

EDWIN ACKERMAN: Right. So, what was the judicial reform that just passed, first of all? It would put judges up for election, right? This includes up to the Supreme Court judges. Now, a couple of things to clarify here is, judges — the Supreme Court judges in Mexico are already term limited, so it’s not a lifetime appointment like it is in U.S. So, they would be limited to 15 years, capped. And there’s also a recent history of a revamping of the Supreme Court in the late '90s, right? So it doesn't hold the same sort of, let’s say, quasi-divine, mystical character that it does in the U.S. It’s been sort of, you know, meddled with much more recently.

But what is the motivation for this push to have judges be elected? The motivation, from the point of view of the government, is judicial independence, actually, that there’s a sort of politicization of the judiciary. It’s too beholden to formal and semiformal networks of influence, of private interest groups, and putting judges up for election is a way of overcoming that.

And a couple of important things about the context to keep in mind for this reform is that, as I was mentioning, the judiciary, the Supreme Court in particular, has become, at least according to the government, increasingly politicized, even explicitly so. For example, there’s a series of major legislative reforms during the six-year period that were overturned on, we could say, sort of petty proceduralist grounds, right? This included things like major reforms to the energy sector that would have given the state-owned electricity company a much stronger role. But there’s also more concrete things like, for example, at the beginning of the year it was revealed that the head of the Supreme Court, Norma Piña, the head of the Supreme Court, had held secret meetings with the leader of the PRI and a very top high-ranking leader of the PAN, so two of the parties of the neoliberal right. These were secret meetings held in a private address. The information was then leaked. Actually, the content of the meetings is still unknown, but the meetings themselves are quite troubling.

In addition to that, there’s an even long-standing — longer-standing dispute between the Supreme Court and the executive and the Legislature, for that matter, over salaries, over compensation of the Supreme Court justices. So, when AMLO took office, he voluntarily lowered his salary. And the Constitution, as it stands, states that no public official can make more than the president. So, that meant that, by default, the Supreme Court justices, who have really high compensation packages, would have to take a pay cut. They refused to do so, against what the Constitution says. So they have been actually in violation of the Constitution for the past six years. And the list goes on and on. We could — last point I would say here is, for example, by the — 

AMY GOODMAN: We have 20 seconds.

EDWIN ACKERMAN: OK. The Supreme Court’s report on this, their own report, half of the people that work in the judiciary have family members in the judiciary, which just speaks to the level of nepotism and, again, formal networks and semiformal networks of influence that exist there. So, that’s the context for the push.

AMY GOODMAN: We want to thank you for being with us. Edwin Ackerman is sociology professor at Syracuse University, author of Origins of the Mass Parties: Dispossession and the Party-Form in Mexico and Bolivia. We’ll link to your piece in Jacobin, “AMLO’s War on Neoliberal Corruption.” We’ll do an interview in Spanish at democracynow.org and post it at there. I’m Amy Goodman, with Juan González.