Solving the equation: López Obrador's Mexico and the “fourth transformation”

Abstract

More than halfway through his term in office, the six-year term of Andrés Manuel López Obrador at the head of the Mexican State is already showing its transit routes. This text supports the hypothesis that the self-styled "Fourth Transformation", the name given to the social movement that brought him to the presidency, is, above all, a change in the terms of the "social equation", a category with which René Zavaleta sought to account for the totality of a social formation. The change is expressed in what is traditionally understood as a reform of the State with very specific emphases. In the history of the Mexican State, rather than a radical overturn or rupture, it is a transformation in very specific ties and segments that generate a reformulation of the political regime.