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On the Mexico and Colombia elections (from IKN471)

A bit of the ‘Regional Politics’ section of last night’s edition of The IKN Weekly, IKN471:

Mexico: All roads now leading to AMLO

With less
than a month to go before the big vote date, we’re now getting headlines in Mexico’s press
like this one (translated):

“Victory
For AMLO Seems Inevitable, According To Polls”

That from the
Diario de Yucatán (8) but there are any number of op-eds and reports out there
now saying the same thing in different ways. López Obrador’s support has
remained strong though the final stages of the election campaign, by general
consensus he’s performed well at the two live televised debates so far (there’s
one to go in a few days’ time), and what’s more the support of his main rivals
Anaya and Meade has stagnated (they continue to split the “anyone but AMLO”
vote).

So get used
to the idea of AMLO as the next President of Mexico, but don’t fear him as much
as some of the near-inevitable English headlines will have you believe in days
ahead. You’re sure to get certain media channels screaming about Left Wing
disasters and suchlike but fret not, AMLO isn’t the hard left reactionary that
he once was and part of his successful march to the presidency this time is
because, unlike the previous two attempts, his message and policies are toned
down and centre-left in style and substance. Mexico will remain a market economy
and investor friendly, there will be decisions around the margin of that but
nothing we as FDI people should worry about too much.

In fact I
would contend that the outcome to the Colombia
election is far more important in regional geopolitical terms than that of Mexico
and as you are about to see, that’s pointing toward a happy ending as well.

Colombia: Iván Duque now red hot favourite
to be next President

By way of
confirmation of this publication’s initial reaction of hearing of the out-sized
victory margin of Iván Duque in last weekend’s first round of elections in Colombia,
the first set of reliable polls on the round two run-off between Duque and let
wing Gustavo Petro look like this (9):

  • Duque: 55%
  • Petro: 35%
  • To spoil ballot/don’t know:
    10%

That 20
point margin will be near-impossible to close for Petro and we can now be
confident that Duque will win and the Álvaro Uribe dauphin will become the next
President of Colombia.

I’ve been
asked by a couple of you what this means for mining in Colombia and the best
answer is “no worse than today”, which isn’t much improvement of course (the
legislation and institutional support for hard rock mining continues to be
sorely lacking), but even a continuation of the current “muddling along”
situation is better than the overtly anti-mining stance that would have been
adopted by a Petro government.

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