What new Mexican president Andres Manuel Lopez Obrador thinks about Donald Trump

'I want a friendly relationship with the government of the United States, but not one of subordination,' Mr Lopez Obrador says

Mexico’s leftist president-elect Andres Manuel Lopez Obrador, who has expressed his desire to build bridges with the US as Mexico’s new leader, has been a vocal critic of Donald Trump since the US commander-in-chief launched his presidential campaign.

Mr Lopez Obrador, known as his initials AMLO, declared victory after clinching a landslide win. The 64-year-old president-elect won with more than 53 percent of the vote campaigning on promises to eradicate Mexico’s violence and corruption – an issue voters perceived went unchecked under outgoing President Enrique Pena Nieto.

Mexico’s new leader and former mayor of Mexico City has certainly not minced words when he’s previously addressed President Trump’s divisive campaign rhetoric promising to build a wall on the US-Mexico border and make Mexico pay for it.

After the 2017 Inauguration, the 64-year-old president-elect published a book titled, Oye, Trump! (Listen up, Trump!), featuring a compilation of speeches he made on a tour in the US. In one of Mr Lopez Obrador’s speeches he said, “Trump and his advisers speak of the Mexicans the way Hitler and the Nazis referred to the Jews, just before undertaking the infamous persecution and the abominable extermination."

Mr Lopez Obrador also once referred to Mr Trump as “erratic” and “arrogant” at a rally in Mexico City, according to NPR. He reportedly criticised Mr Trump’s campaign promise to build a wall adding, “and we won't allow his wall or mistreatment of our fellow migrants in the US.”

Mr Lopez Obrador told a rally of people in Los Angeles last year that Mr Trump’s pledge to build a wall, “goes against humanity.”

“When they want to build a wall to segregate populations, or when the word ‘foreigner’ is used to insult, denigrate and discriminate against our fellow human beings, it goes against humanity, it goes against intelligence and against history,” he said.

In an op-ed published in The Washington Post last year, Mr Lopez Obrador referred to Mr Trump's border wall plans as xenophobic and racist.

“On Nov. 9 2016 it became clear that the Mexico-U.S. bilateral relationship had entered a rocky phase," he wrote. "This was due not only to the incoming Trump administration’s policy of xenophobia and racism and the threat to block trade, but also to the arbitrary and abusive plans to force Mexicans to pay for a border wall..."

A few months prior to that, the Mexican president-elect filed a complaint with the United Nations’ Office of the High Commissioner for Human Rights against Mr Trump’s planned border wall with efforts to “... protect immigrants from the harassment they are suffering since [Mr] Trump took office.”

Although Mr Lopez Obrador is a celebrated leader of the left, he has interestingly been compared with Mr Trump for his nationalist, populist and impulsive tendencies.

Mr Trump congratulated the Mexican president-elect and leader of the Movement for National Regeneration (MORENA) party on Twitter.

“Congratulations to Andres Manuel Lopez Obrador on becoming the next President of Mexico,” he wrote. “I look very much forward to working with him. There is much to be done that will benefit both the United States and Mexico!”

Mr Lopez Obrador has publicly expressed his plans to foster a friendly relationship with US but he has also made it clear he would be no pushover to the Trump administration. During a presidential debate in May, the president-elect declared that Mexico’s relationship with the US would not be one of “subordination” should he win the election.

“I want a friendly relationship with the government of the United States, but not one of subordination,” he said. “Mexico is a free country, it is a sovereign nation. We will not be subject to any foreign government.”