A bad energy law says much about Mexico’s president

WITH THE pandemic raging and the economy in a slump, Mexico’s Congress found time to discuss a new electricity law at the behest of President Andrés Manuel López Obrador. Approved on March 3rd, it will make electricity more expensive, dirtier and less reliable. It has thrown into doubt the value of some $26bn of private investment in wind and solar energy, mainly by foreign companies. That Mr López Obrador (or AMLO for short) sets so much store by such a bad law says much about what is wrong with his vision for his country.

Until the 1990s electricity was a state monopoly in Mexico, mainly in the hands of the Comisión Federal de Electricidad (CFE). A timid opening to the private sector, begun in the 1990s, gathered force with an energy reform by the government of Enrique Peña Nieto in 2014. This allowed private investment in oil and gas as well as electricity generation. It established a wholesale electricity market. A regulatory commission set rules under which the cheapest and greenest providers of power would get priority in selling to the grid.