Why Is Trump ‘Not Important’ in Mexico Election? All Candidates Are Against Him.

MEXICO CITY — During several lively campaign rallies on a recent day in Mexico City, the leftist front-runner in the Mexican presidential race told his supporters what they wanted to hear, time and again.

Andrés Manuel López Obrador, a former mayor of Mexico City, railed against corruption and what he called “the mafia of power.” He vowed to combat violence and impunity. He decried inequality and promised wage increases for the working class. He pledged to increase investment in social services for the young and the old.

But there was one issue notably absent from his populist oratory: international relations, specifically those with the neighbor to the north.

López Obrador’s only mention of President Donald Trump — who has spent the past two years hectoring Mexico, stripping the bilateral relationship of much of its hard-fought goodwill — was a throwaway joke about selling him the Mexican presidential plane in an effort to pare back executive branch luxuries.

“The thing he wants Mexico to hear first is ‘Mexico,'” said Martín García Quintero, 56, a construction worker at one of the rallies, explaining the candidate’s appeal. “He wants a Mexico with more coming its way.”

Trump’s attacks on Mexico were a focus from the beginning of his presidential campaign, during which he villainized Mexican immigrants and accused them of stealing American jobs, and vowed to make Mexico pay for the construction of a border wall.

Since winning office, he has not backed off, continuing to hammer Mexico, especially on the subjects of security, migration and trade. He has promised to reduce immigration, increase deportations and drastically rewrite the North American Free Trade Agreement, or simply toss it out.

Relations between the two governments have turned so frosty that 16 months into Trump’s presidency, his Mexican counterpart, President Enrique Peña Nieto, has yet to visit the White House.

The subjects of trade, migration and the border were, by intention, the focus of the most recent presidential debate among the four candidates, on May 20, and Trump and his treatment of Mexico were recurring motifs throughout the evening. And last week, Trump imposed tariffs on metal imports from Mexico as well Canada and Europe, drawing criticism from the presidential candidates.

But that attention to bilateral relations was an anomaly in the campaign. As the July 1 election nears, the relationship between the United States and Mexico has been only a minor theme, and often mostly absent.

“It’s not going to have a bearing on how Mexicans will vote,” said Arturo Sarukhán, a former Mexican ambassador to Washington. “The only way that Trump and the Mexican relationship with the United States could have a role is if, before July 1, Trump does something really dumb like withdrawing from NAFTA, or something very aggressive on the border.”

Amid the profound problems facing Mexico, matters of international relations can seem abstract and remote to many voters, and Trump’s periodic attacks can feel irrelevant.

Rather, the issues that seem to be animating the electorate are immediate problems that directly affect Mexicans’ quality of life, including historically high rates of violence; poverty and inequality; and intractable corruption and impunity.

“No Mexican voter is going to expect any candidate to talk about Trump,” said José Merino, a political analyst who is advising the Mexico City mayoral candidate from López Obrador’s party, Morena, the Spanish-language acronym for the National Regeneration Movement.

After a López Obrador rally last month in the western part of Mexico City, Mónica Gutiérrez Díaz, 48, a government employee, began enumerating the challenges she and her relatives face on a daily basis, from low salaries to rampant crime.

“My entire family, we are all professionals, but we’re all in a really bad way,” she said.

Amid these constant struggles, she said, voters do not have much bandwidth for Trump and foreign policy.

“He’s not important to us,” Gutiérrez said.

This was not always the case. There was a time during the U.S. presidential campaign and in the early months of the Trump presidency when Trump’s anti-Mexico utterances could whip this nation into a froth of patriotic outrage.

But Mexico quickly learned to mostly ignore Trump’s outbursts, as it might the faint rumble of distant thunder. Officials and ordinary Mexicans alike have come to view most of Trump’s threats and hostile rhetoric as little more than bluster and political gamesmanship aimed as much, if not more, at his base as it is at Mexico.

While the presidential candidates have sought to differentiate themselves on key domestic issues, they have largely echoed each other in their positions on Mexico’s relationship with the United States.

In the May 20 debate, they sought to show they would be able to stand up to Trump’s bullying, defend Mexico’s sovereignty and honor, and support both Mexican immigrants in the United States and those returning to Mexico.

“Curiously, the arrival of Trump has turned the United States into a nonissue in the campaign,” said Vidal Fernando Romero León, head of the political science department at the Instituto Tecnológico Autónomo de México, a university in Mexico City. “It’s not easy for them to differentiate themselves in terms of what they are going to do with Trump — they are all against Trump. It’s something you’re required to say you’re against.” But while Trump’s policies and his aggressive approach to Mexico have not factored prominently in the campaign, the victor, analysts said, will soon enough be grappling with their effects on a range of bilateral issues, from the North American Free Trade Agreement to migration to security.

Sarukhán predicts that by the time the next Mexican president assumes office, he will find himself under tremendous domestic pressure not to give any ground to Trump, leaving very little “political wiggle room” to manage the Mexico-United States relationship.

The unanimity among the candidates regarding Trump, he said, “tells you that there will be a challenge to building the relationship going forward.”

Washington could be facing a very different Mexico, he added. In the United States, he said, “people will be asking, ‘Who lost Mexico?'”