Many Mex­i­cans will feel a deep sense of loss when folksy, charis­mat­ic, na­tion­al­is­tic Pres­i­dent An­drés Manuel López Obrador leaves of­fice on Sept. 30 — and that’s no sur­prise.

López Obrador him­self has spent an in­or­di­nate amount of time talk­ing about his own lega­cy — and his place in his­to­ry — over his six-year term, some­thing he brings up at al­most every one of his marathon­ic dai­ly 7 a.m. me­dia brief­in­gs.

But what lega­cy will the rum­pled, grin­ning López Obrador leave be­hind? It is per­haps the main ques­tion for a man who is ob­sessed with his­to­ry, and one thing ap­pears clear: he has changed the way pol­i­tics is done in Mex­i­co, per­haps for­ev­er.

Un­like decades of re­served and dis­tant pres­i­dents, López Obrador has built a deep per­son­al con­nec­tion with many Mex­i­cans. He has stripped the of­fice of the thou­sands of pres­i­den­tial guards, lim­ou­sines and walled com­pounds that once char­ac­ter­ized it, say­ing “you can’t have a rich gov­ern­ment with poor peo­ple.”

“He is a politi­cian who evokes fa­mil­iar­i­ty, he re­minds peo­ple of a fa­ther, an un­cle, a grand­fa­ther,” said Car­los Pérez Ri­cart, a po­lit­i­cal an­a­lyst at Mex­i­co’s Cen­ter for Eco­nom­ic Re­search and Teach­ing. That’s not a co­in­ci­dence, ei­ther. López Obrador con­stant­ly prais­es the tra­di­tion­al fam­i­ly and says it has saved the coun­try.

“He does feel nos­tal­gia for some of the so­cial struc­tures of the 1970s in Mex­i­co and nos­tal­gia for the fam­i­ly,” said Pérez Ri­cart.

Will his lega­cy be like that of U.S. Pres­i­dent Franklin D. Roo­sevelt, whose New Deal cre­at­ed last­ing in­sti­tu­tions like So­cial Se­cu­ri­ty and home mort­gage pro­grams that re­sult­ed in an enor­mous, sta­ble mid­dle class?

The Mex­i­can leader stakes his move­ment on cash so­cial-ben­e­fit pro­grams, he likes to com­pare him­self to Roo­sevelt and many Mex­i­cans think of him with the same fond­ness that the more pa­tri­cian FDR in­spired in his day.

“I think he’s go­ing to be re­mem­bered as a pres­i­dent who start­ed big changes, who thought about the peo­ple,” said Ar­man­do López, 60, who works as a street clean­er.

Ma­ri­na Fi­esco, an of­fice work­er tak­ing a break at a Mex­i­co City park with her 11-year-old son, voiced sim­i­lar feel­ings.

“I feel he does think about the peo­ple,” said Fi­esco. “It’s not about left or right, a pres­i­dent has to look out for the peo­ple.”

Part of that con­nec­tion is that he talks more, and fields more ques­tions, than prob­a­bly any oth­er leader in the world.

In his six years in of­fice, he has held about 1,400 tele­vised morn­ing brief­in­gs that last an av­er­age of 2 1/2 hours each. He tells jokes, talks about his fa­vorite foods, lash­es out at crit­i­cal jour­nal­ists, makes fun of the op­po­si­tion and some­times plays his fa­vorite mu­sic videos. Most brief­in­gs end with him say­ing, “Let’s go get break­fast.”

He fre­quent­ly says things that are not true. He claims Mex­i­co doesn’t pro­duce fen­tanyl — the dead­ly syn­thet­ic opi­oid that kills about 70,000 Amer­i­cans every year — even though his own of­fi­cials have con­tra­dict­ed him. When homi­cides spiked this year — de­spite his claims to have achieved an 18% re­duc­tion — he sim­ply ig­nored the fig­ures.

Many Mex­i­cans seem will­ing to tol­er­ate the un­truths, in part be­cause López Obrador, 70, has mas­tered a key Mex­i­can folk say­ing: “He who gets an­gry, los­es.” He brush­es re­al con­tra­dic­tions and prob­lems off with a chuck­le, a stony re­fusal to dis­cuss them, or his stock phrase, “I have oth­er da­ta.”

He’s prob­a­bly the most skill­ful politi­cian ever to rule Mex­i­co and seems to en­joy some un­stop­pable mo­ti­vat­ing force: in all of his thou­sands of hours of talk­ing, nev­er once has he sat down, tak­en one sip of wa­ter or gone off to use the bath­room.

In­flu­enced by Mex­i­can pres­i­dents of the 20th cen­tu­ry, López Obrador would have liked to make his mark with big in­fra­struc­ture projects — he is ob­sessed with rail­roads and oil re­finer­ies — and big state-owned com­pa­nies like the ones that dom­i­nat­ed Mex­i­co’s econ­o­my in the 1970s, his for­ma­tive years.

But his build­ing projects have been of­ten ill-planned and will be sub­ject to the with­er­ing trends of eco­nom­ic and en­er­gy tran­si­tion. Un­like his he­roes from the past, he hasn’t been able to na­tion­al­ize any in­dus­try, and has on­ly been able to fight a rear-guard ac­tion to de­fend the in­debt­ed, strug­gling state-owned oil and elec­tric pow­er com­pa­nies he in­her­it­ed.

Nor has he been able to make much of a mark in for­eign pol­i­cy, apart from a few rather point­less, un­re­solved dis­putes with Spain, the Vat­i­can, Ecuador and Pe­ru. In the face of U.S. pres­sure, he has used the 120,000-mem­ber na­tion­al guard he cre­at­ed not to con­front drug car­tels, but to pre­vent mi­grants from reach­ing the U.S. bor­der.

And his so­cial pro­grams — like the $150-per month pay­ment to peo­ple over 65 — can fade, be de­fund­ed or evis­cer­at­ed by in­fla­tion.

So could López Obrador turn out to be a fig­ure like Ar­genti­na’s pres­i­dent in the 1940s and 50s, Juan Perón, who left be­hind an ide­o­log­i­cal­ly amor­phous lega­cy that was fought over by dis­parate wings of his move­ment for decades?

“I think that what we are go­ing to see is the ‘balka­niza­tion’ of Obrador-ism,” said Pérez Ri­cart, “a dis­pute be­tween the left and the right to own the term, a bit like what hap­pened with Per­o­nism in Ar­genti­na.”

Or he could go down in his­to­ry as the per­son who, how­ev­er briefly, re­vived the near­ly cen­tu­ry-old Mex­i­can tra­di­tion of a “state par­ty”, like the old PRI, where López Obrador be­gan his po­lit­i­cal ca­reer. The PRI ruled Mex­i­co for 70 years, be­fore cor­rup­tion, in­ter­nal dis­putes and eco­nom­ic crises brought it down.

Some of López Obrador’s most de­vot­ed fol­low­ers seem sur­pris­ing­ly will­ing to take the chance of an­oth­er PRI.

“If af­ter 70 years we’ve found we made a mis­take, well, that’s life,” Fi­esco said.

López Obrador may be part of a re­gion-wide re­vival of old, pop­ulis­tic state-par­ty mod­els, both on the left and right.

For ex­am­ple, El Sal­vador’s Pres­i­dent Nay­ib Bukele stress­es that his ad­min­is­tra­tion — which won even greater mar­gins of re­elec­tion than López Obrador’s More­na — is a “hege­mon­ic par­ty, not a state par­ty.”

That’s al­most ex­act­ly how More­na sup­port­ers de­scribe their move­ment, but the in­stant any par­ty starts to use the pow­er of the gov­ern­ment to keep it­self in pow­er, that dis­tinc­tion dis­ap­pears.

Most peo­ple think it’s un­like­ly that More­na will last as long in pow­er as the sev­en-decade run of the PRI.

“Times have changed, that’s not pos­si­ble any­more,” said Ar­man­do López, the street clean­er. “Peo­ple will sup­port him as long as they see some­thing (in re­turn). They’re not go­ing to fol­low him blind­ly.”

The More­na par­ty was cob­bled to­geth­er by López Obrador out of old PRI mem­bers like him­self and peo­ple from more left­ist back­grounds. López Obrador is More­na’s star, its guide, its moral au­thor­i­ty. Once he’s gone, the ten­sions with­in the par­ty — al­ready pal­pa­ble — will like­ly grow stronger.

López Obrador is very aware of that, and from the start he has con­scious­ly built struc­tures to guard his lega­cy, which he views as his own, not the par­ty’s. He has hand­ed more eco­nom­ic and law-en­force­ment pow­er over to the armed forces than any oth­er Mex­i­can pres­i­dent, be­cause the army obeys him un­ques­tion­ing­ly and he trusts them.

His longest-last­ing lega­cy may be those struc­tur­al changes: the mil­i­ta­riza­tion of law en­force­ment and large swaths of the econ­o­my, the elim­i­na­tion of all in­de­pen­dent reg­u­la­to­ry and over­sight agen­cies, the fre­quent at­tacks on the me­dia and a ju­di­cial over­haul that crit­ics say will weak­en de­mo­c­ra­t­ic checks and bal­ances.

Mex­i­co’s armed forces now run air­ports, trains, cus­toms fa­cil­i­ties — and even an air­line.

“The truth is that there is one re­al­ly im­por­tant lega­cy, and that is the lega­cy of mil­i­ta­riza­tion,” said Guadalupe Cor­rea-Cabr­era, an as­so­ciate pro­fes­sor at George Ma­son Uni­ver­si­ty.

By  MARK STEVEN­SON

MEX­I­CO CITY (AP)