Charismatic Leadership in Left Populism: The Missionary Politics of Andrés Manuel López Obrador

The research discusses the inner workings of charismatic leadership in contemporary populism, based on a case study of Mexico's 65th President, Andrés Manuel López Obrador (AMLO). The purpose of the research is to analyse AMLO’s discourse and performance in a variety of settings and to distil from these public appearances elements conducive to conveying charismatic authority to his audience. In contemporary scholarship, charismatic populist leadership is frequently regarded as a form of mass manipulation, designed solely to help personalistic leaders gain and retain power. The research challenges this reading by examining charismatic leadership as a relational phenomenon in which both parties have agency. On the one hand, it analyses the leader’s ability to inspire and motivate his followers by constructing a public persona that is simultaneously ordinary and extraordinary; the thesis argues that this holds the key to his charismatic appeal. On the other, it acknowledges the followers' paramount role in assessing the congruence of the leader’s discourse and performance, attributing charisma only if the leader’s ordinary / extraordinary persona is deemed credible. Offering a novel contribution to the literature, the research discusses the role of faith in the charismatic bond forged between the leader and the led, analysing faith from both secular and spiritual perspectives (the promise of redemption in this life and salvation in the afterlife). It is an aspect that current scholarship tends to overlook, considering it anachronistic, but the research queries this assumption and illustrates how faith in what Margaret Canovan called the redemptive face of democracy still acts as a powerful mobilising factor in modern-day politics. The research applies Pedro Zúquete’s concept of missionary politics to a twenty-first century Mexican context, hitherto unexplored. It thus represents a significant contribution to both populism and Latin American studies.