Politics: The National Development Plan—where is Mexico headed?
Mexico’s immediate future will largely be determined by the National Development Plan (NDP). The 2025-2030 version of the plan was recently approved by Morena and its allies in Congress. The plan had sparked optimism in some business circles given the perception—and hope—that President Claudia Sheinbaum has a more reality-grounded approach to practical political and economic issues than her predecessor, Andrés Manuel López Obrador (AMLO), with whom she nonetheless shares an overall ideological orientation, continually proclaiming continuity with his nation-building project. But the final text, although it does advance some concrete goals, doesn’t reach the level of offering a comprehensive and coherent technical vision of the government's task for the next six years.
In the NDP, the government's public policies are articulated around four general axes—governance with justice and citizen participation, development with wellbeing and humanism, moral economy, and sustainable development—and three cross-cutting axes (substantive equality and women's rights, public innovation for national technological development, and rights of Indigenous and Afro-Mexican communities.) But the concrete commitments on public security, tax collection goals, women’s rights, and many other issues are, despite the rhetoric, quite modest.
The cautious advances, of course, must be considered in the context of the uncertain global panorama and the ever present shadow cast by Donald Trump’s tariff threats and Washington’s other potential political and economic measures. Indeed, in the past few days, the World Bank and the International Monetary Fund have both downgraded their forecasts on Mexico’s economic growth.
Nevertheless, of particular concern in regards to the NDP is the absence of an economic growth goal, which comes on the heels of a paltry 1% increase in GDP in the previous six years. Some token sustainable development goals are advanced, such as in the fields of energy sovereignty and energy transition, as well as on the level of the government’s much touted social wellbeing programs, but they are very moderate.
The main problem with the newly approved NDP boils down to the underlying inadequate diagnosis of the country, the result of the political impossibility of assuming the slightest self-criticism with respect to AMLO’s legacy, which continues to define the government’s overall policies. Without such self-criticism, the possibility of creating coherent and integrated proposals is difficult.
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