With no visible leaders and no real project, it still has a long way to go by 2024. Until now, AMLO has overcome the challenge of representing the sovereign people, that is, of giving it a representation. His personal image has served as a graphic and concrete representation of the "people". As Nadia Urbinati has pointed out, this type of political image pretends to be an authentic form of incarnation. In this process, AMLO has given a certain coherence, fictitious as it may be, to Mexican society.
It has achieved this by devising symbols and giving them a new charge of democratic legitimation through the popular vote. But he has created this appearance of social and political coherence, this south africa phone number list sense of collective purpose, through the discursive formulation of an opposition between two camps: a binary struggle between, on the one hand, the authentic people of the groups marginalized by neoliberalism that only AMLO can represent - what he calls the good people - and, on the other, that "political residue" of Mexican society that does not truly belong to the people and to which he refers generically as "the conservatives", "those from above" or, more recently, the fifis.
The critics who rightly point out that López Obrador has produced a division in Mexican society do not recognize that this antagonistic discourse is at the same time the touchstone of a coherence that did not exist before, and that the image that AMLO has contributed is apparently one of the few images of national unity, however contradictory and incomplete it may be, that exist today. Nor do these critics recognize that AMLO's rhetoric has reactivated the idea of the demos and revitalized an aspect of Mexican democracy. But one telltale red flag is that since he came to power the number of groups and movements included in his vision of the "people" has been shrinking, while the virulence of his agitating rhetoric has increased dramatically.