Alex González Ormerod’s, new book La derecha no existe (pero ahí está): Guía para entender su fracaso y futuro en México (In English, The right doesn’t exist (but there it is): A guide to understand its failure and future in Mexico) is an important and captivating project. González Ormerod is one of the voices of the Mexican Political Economist and a knowledgeable commentator on Mexican politics.
The book offers an analysis of Mexico’s right wing, detailing the right’s political formations, aspirations, and failures throughout the nation’s history. It seeks to answer an elusive question: what does it mean to be right-wing in Mexico?
The book comes out amid a series of victories for the left-wing party Morena since 2018, including the election of Andres Manuel López Obrador and his successor, President Claudia Sheinbaum. With the sweeping wins of the left, little attention has been paid to how Mexico’s right wing found itself in a depleted position and how it may look to challenge Morena moving forward. This book completes this important task.
History of the Right and Liberalism in Mexico
Mexico has a unique political history, which has made the self-described ‘right-wing’ label largely unfashionable for well over 100 years. As González puts it in the book, “Since the 19th century, the victory of liberalism has given us the fundamental reason why ‘right-wing’ and ‘conservative’ have become dirty words today”.
Liberalism made big gains in Mexico in the 19th century, first, with the victory of Benito Juárez, Mexico’s first Indigenous president, and leader of the Liberal Party, over the conservatives and French occupiers.
Later, the “general in the liberal army” turned dictator Porfirio Díaz, presided over a regime supported by an apparatus of so-called “cientificos” following the doctrine of liberal positivism. The 1910 Mexican Revolution, which overthrew Díaz was led by a range of military and political men, under the banner of a new, true liberalism. While the revolution was grounded in a range of Indigenous, social-democratic, and socialist ideals alongside liberalism, it was the liberals who found themselves in power when the smoke cleared.
The following 71 years of post-revolutionary Mexico, governed under the single-party rule by the Institutional Revolutionary Party (PRI), made clear that the 20th-century Mexican national project was essentially a liberal political project.
This defeat-ridden history of the Mexican right, which González captures, lays bare that “the victory of Mexican liberalism also laid the foundations for the country’s ideological center of gravity, which survives to this day”.
Unsurprisingly, being right-wing became increasingly untenable for those seeking power.
Mexico’s Right in Power
González Ormerod follows the rise and fall of the right at the turn of the 21st century with the presidential terms of Vicente Fox and Felipe Calderón, both candidates of the National Action Party (PAN).
The election of the right-wing PAN Candidate Vicente Fox in 2000, ending the 71-year reign of the PRI, is, for González, the “first step in the suicide of the right wing”:
“Fox was a man shaped by neoliberalism. His career in the private sector led him to become an executive at one of the companies that best represented the promise of globalization in Mexico (Coca Cola)”. While in power, Fox applied a brutal regime of shock therapy defined by austerity and liberalization of markets.
Despite this, González argues that “Foxism in government shows the failure of a movement that lacked ideological clarity when faced with the need to lead the state apparatus”. Contradictorily, Fox also “dispel[s] any notion that claiming to be ‘ideology-free’ means that they do not actually carry any ideologies.” It was the contradictions of embracing and quickly abandoning progressive ideals when they were valuable, while at the same time dogmatically following a pro-business agenda that utterly isolated the PAN administration.
In 2006, PAN candidate Felipe Calderón came up against and defeated Party of the Democratic Revolution (PRD) candidate Andrés Manuel López Obrador. López Obrador (often referred to as AMLO) was considered the favourite over the PAN; however, as González writes, “[The right] always has an ace up its sleeve when faced with progressive utopias—fear.” Calderón won the election largely due to this tactic; his presidency was not nearly as successful.
González argues, “the PAN governments had failed. The economy was stagnant, violence was spiralling out of control, and the state seemed paralyzed. Many still distrusted the left, so voters began to wonder why they had ousted the PRI”. Under these conditions, it is no surprise PAN would lose the 2012 election to the PRI’s Enrique Peña Nieto.
The book’s exhaustive historical analysis of this process of ‘democratization’ under the auspices of the right unveils how and why the right wing has found itself utterly decimated now.
What Does Morena Mean for the Right?
The election of the National Regeneration Movement (Morena) led by AMLO “pulverized the Mexican political universe”.
The election of President Claudia Sheinbaum in 2024 only strengthened Morena’s power in Mexican politics, as right-wing forces have yet to coalesce a strong opposition to the left-in-power.
As González argues, “The new Mexican right wing has many names and comes in many shades because, rather than a movement or even a coalition, it is currently a conglomeration of affiliations and phobias that only sometimes coincide”.
This ‘pulverizing’ of the Mexican right, as González deems it, explains the question which guided the book’s creation: what and where is the right? González explains how this “explains why the right wing in Mexico seems so empty today. The battle being fought is not against the ultimate enemy—the left—but rather an internal struggle that goes far beyond PAN. The various factions compete with each other, not yet for power, but for attention and, for the first time in a long time, to clearly define what it means to be right-wing.”
He adds that the right-wing today is lacking not just an ideological synthesis, but also the “three basic elements needed to build a movement of any kind: cadre organization, access to the national conversation, and funding.”
González highlights the possibility of a right-wing shift in Mexican politics, particularly focusing on the ways in which Morena has “has indeed moved toward the political center—that is, to the right—abandoning its more radical positions and adopting policies that are more conciliatory toward businesses and the established power structure.”
Ultimately, though, reading González, and really any clear-headed analysis of modern Mexican politics, one gets the idea that the Mexican right would need a major construction of an ideological and national project to truly pounce on Morena. This task will have to address that while the Mexican economy saw little growth, just barely avoiding a technical recession, Morena’s delivery of anti-poverty and inequality policies has delivered relief to much of the electorate.
It is important, still, to recognize that the right still remains; as González Ormerod concludes, “The right wing is there; it just needs to realize its own presence.”
The right in Mexico today
The book’s publication is situated in an interesting moment for the right in Mexico, with the recent rise of some new right-wing figures in Mexico, the impacts of the Donald Trump administration and the rightward shift across a range of Latin American countries.
Mexican billionaire Ricardo Salinas Pliego (no relation to former President Carlos Salinas de Gortari) has risen to become a key figure in the Mexican right, posing as a possible future presidential candidate. As González writes, “there is a latent right wing in Mexico that we have not yet discussed. It is not the old guard clinging to the remnants of its political apparatus. Nor is it the new, militant but fractured wing. It is one that resists entering the political-electoral arena, revealing that there is one last key element necessary for the right wing to succeed: it must have the desire to step in. Ricardo Salinas Pliego has it all”.
The billionaire ‘Uncle Richie’ has ties with other right-wing governments in the western hemisphere, having met with the President of El Salvador, Nayib Bukele, in 2025. Ideologically, González argues, he is similar to “Javier Milei, his philosophy adheres to a kind of extreme capitalist libertarianism whose priorities exalt wealth, personal independence, and economic aspiration without state interference”.
No doubt influenced by Milei and Trump, Salinas represents an all-too-common right-wing strategy of self-describing oneself as an ‘outsider’ and an alternative voice to the progressive mainstream, despite massive wealth and elite credentials.
Salinas has also been involved in an important power struggle with the Sheinbaum administration over his alleged tax evasion. The Sheinbaum government accuses Salinas’s conglomerate of owing upwards of $4 billion USD in unpaid taxes, and a Mexican court recently found that Salinas must pay back $2.5 billion USD. In response, President Sheinbaum has ordered a review of the many federal contracts held by Salinas’s companies, hinting at possible contract cancellations.
Salinas has pushed back strongly against the tax fight. Sheinbaum has claimed that the November 2025 anti-government protests in Mexico City in response to the killing of a mayor in Uruapan were bankrolled by “Uncle Richie.” Salinas has denied the allegations but increasingly appears to be presenting himself as the leader of an anti-leftist campaign in Mexico.
Salinas aside, there remain other right-wing elements in Mexico that are important to note. Mexico has not been untouched by the wave of evangelical Christian politicization which has played an important role in bringing to power not just Trump but others like Brazil’s ex-President Jair Bolsonaro.
This politicization has centred around social issues, as González briefly covers, “a large proportion of evangelicals are also militant in their opposition to abortion and LGBT rights”. These evangelicals, while limited in power right now, have the potential to mobilize 20 million Mexicans.
In more recent news, which could impact a right-wing movement in Mexico, is the Trump administration’s interventionism in Latin America, made evidently clear through the arrest of Venezuelan President Nicolás Maduro. Quickly following the operation, Trump administration officials and right-wing commentators spoke out about intervening in Mexico, which for them poses a problem exemplified not only by security and migration concerns but also by Morena’s “leftist foreign policy,” which was on display through Sheinbaum’s condemnation of the operation. President Sheinbaum will need to balance Mexico’s relationship with the U.S. with Morena’s left-nationalist base; this will be clear in how Mexico-Cuba relations develop in 2026.
The book comes at a time when right-wing forces in Mexico hope to take advantage of U.S. foreign policy and political trends across Latin America in their unique context. Simultaneously, the Morena government hopes to solidify power and subdue any signs of possible threats to what AMLO called the “Fourth Transformation,” a term that describes Morena’s plans to restructure Mexico’s political and economic systems over time on a scale similar to previous “transformations” like the Mexican Revolution.
La derecha no existe (pero ahí está) is an important contribution to political analyses of Mexican history and a forward-looking synthesis of the tumultuous future of right-wing politics in the nation. It is currently available in Spanish and may soon be translated to English.
