Peña Nieto's Popularity Continues to Nose-Dive in Mexico

Mexican President Enrique Peña Nieto probably had the worst week of his life causing his already plummetting popularity to hit a record low. 

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Things took a sharp turn for the worse after Peña Nieto inexplicably agreed to a meeting with Republican presidential candidate Donald Trump, an anti-immigrant hardliner who has referred to Mexican immigrants as rapists, who wants to create a special deportation force in the U.S., and who wants to build a wall - paid for by Mexico - along the border, turned into a national humiliation for the embattled Mexican president. Rather than use the meeting as an opportunity to publicly reprimand Trump, Peña Nieto allowed himself to be used as a political prop by the Republican presidential candidate.

Accusations of corruption, human rights violations, plagiarism and the Trump episode hung over his fourth state of the union on Thursday night. 

Peña Nieto spoke at an unscripted question-and-answer forum in downtown Mexico City, an “open discussion” with youth. However, the result was just more criticism by citizens who accused him of having mounted a live broadcast and even “hire actors,” in a desperate move to benefit the tarnished image of his administration.

During more than an hour Peña Nieto answered at least 20 questions from the public in which he always highlighted the achievements of his four years in power, like the creation of 2 million formal jobs and the millions of tourists that have visited Mexico since he took office.

He took some hard questions too, like when he answered allegations that he plagiarized at least 197 paragraphs of the 682 that make up the text of the thesis he presented in 1991. 

"Nobody can tell me that I plagiarized my thesis, I may have committed some methodological error, but in no way did I want to appropriate the ideas of others," he said. 

Other questions, especially those chosen from social networks, put the nail on the head and questioned the unpopular leader about his meeting with Donald Trump. He only replied evasively, saying that his responsibility is to care for Mexicans, adding that he won't pay for the wall that Trump plans to build in the U.S.-Mexico border if he becomes president. 

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Other issues were briefly discussed, like the conflict with the nation's teachers. Peña Nieto praised his neoliberal education reform and said that those who oppose it are taking students as "hostages." On the other hand, issues like the 43 disappeared Ayotzinapa students and the mounting human rights violations during his administration were literally ignored.  

At the beginning of his term in December 2012, Peña Nieto had a 61 percent approval rating. Now this figure has fallen to just 27 percent, according to national polls.