IN May, there were 2,900 murders in Mexico, the most violent month in two decades. More than 120 political candidates have been murdered since campaigning for today’s presidential and congressional elections began last September. Add in the succession of jaw-dropping corruption scandals and, while the popular uproar about the US President’s plan for a border wall is significant, it’s domestic issues – the drug-related murders and the endemic economic pillaging – which have been dominant.

The overwhelming favourite to win, and to break the hegemony of the parties which have ruled the country since 1917, is Andrés Manuel Lopez Obrador, known as Amlo, a 64-year-old who is promising to remake the country in the spirit of its founding revolutionaries like Pancho Villa and Emiliano Zapata. He has had two previous tilts at the presidency, in 2006, when he lost by a tiny margin and claimed fraud, and in 2012, when the result and the accusation was the same. This time, all of the polls are predicting he will romp home by a huge margin.

The current president is Enrique Pena Lopez of the widely-loathed PRI (the Institutional Revolutionary Party) but as the Mexican constitution allows only one six-year term for presidents, the mantle has been taken by José Antonio Meade, a career civil servant, whose anaemic efforts to portray himself as the everyman, rather than the representative of the party which has governed Mexico for most of 100 years, has singularly failed to impress voters.

Running a distant second to Amlo in the polls is 39-year-old lawyer Ricardo Anaya of the National Action party (PAN) who leads a Byzantine left-right coalition mired in corruption and who has a reputation for naked ruthlessness.

Far behind the pack is Jaime “El Bronco” Rodriguez, an independent, on three per cent in the polls, who has a fundamental, almost Islamic approach to cleaning up crime – he wants to cut off the hands of criminals.

Amlo’s popularity has been given a huge boost by Trump’s repeated disparaging rhetoric against Mexico and its people. “They are not our friend, believe me,” he said, of immigrants coming across the southern border before his election. “They’re bringing drugs. They’re bringing crime. They’re rapists. And some, I assume, are good people.” He also tweeted: “I want nothing to do with Mexico other than to build an impenetrable WALL and stop them from ripping off U.S.” Going on to describe them as “enemies”.

Not long before Trump’s inauguration Amlo published a best-selling book called Oye, Trump (Listen, Trump) which contained snippets from his speeches. One went: “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.” And last week he came back to denouncing Trump’s “arrogant, racist and inhuman family separation policy”.

Trump had been warned that if he didn’t tone down the rhetoric it would, as it has done, boost Amlo’s popularity. John McCain, probably the last person Trump would listen to, warned that the outcome was likely to be a “left-wing, anti-American President”. Roberta Jacobsen, who was until last month US ambassador to Mexico, said: “Every time an American politician opens their mouth to express a negative view about a Mexican candidate it helps him.”

But, like Trump, Amlo has always presented himself as an outsider. He was born in 1953 in Tabasco state, on the Gulf of Mexico, to a family of shopkeepers. Tabasco is bisected by rivers which regularly flood its town. His nickname, El Peje, comes from pejelagarto, a primitive freshwater fish with a head like an alligator’s.

When Amlo was a boy his family moved to the state capital, Villahermosa, and later he moved to Mexico City where he studied political science and public policy at a state university. His thesis was on the formation of the Mexican state. According to those who know him well his ambition was always to be president – “like an arrow, straight and unswerving” according to one observer.

For someone with serious political ambitions there was, then, only one party to join, the PRI, a party which had set out as a radical socialist one – nationalising the oil industry and giving millions of acres of farmland to the poor and dispossessed – but as its grip on power tightened its revolutionary zeal weakened.

Lopez Obrador rose swiftly. He spent five years in Tabasco running the National Indigenous Institute and then a department of the National Consumer Institute in the capital. But he had become despairing of the party and efforts to reform it. In 1988 he joined a breakaway group – the Partido Revolucionario Democratico – and six years later ran for governor of the state. He lost to the PRI candidate and cried fraud. It later emerged that the party had spent $95 million dollars on an election in which just half a million voted.

In 2000, he was elected mayor of Mexico City which, along with immense power, gave him national visibility. He carried his personal style into office, arriving at work before sunrise in a battered Nissan, cutting his own salary, but at times governing by edict. He was, even his critics accept, successful. He created a pension fund for the elderly of the city, expanded main roads to ease the legendary congestion and devised a public-private initiative to restore the historic centre of the city. When he left office in 2006, to fight for the presidency, his approval ratings were high as was his reputation for achievement.

Amlo lost the 2006 presidential vote, to PAN candidate Felipe Calderon, by half a percentage point. The campaign against him from the right had been relentless and extravagantly funded. He was portrayed as a dangerous populist with images showing poverty and human misery alongside portraits of Hugo Chavez, Fidel Castro and Evo Morales. The message was drummed home, he was a socialist bogeyman, a danger to Mexico.

In 2012, he won a third of the vote but lost to Pena Nieto, who returned the PRI to power, but since then his administration has been shot through by corruption and human rights scandals. In 2016 a PRI governor, Javier Duarte, disappeared in a government helicopter after being accused of corruption, stealing up to $2 billion, and was later arrested in Guatemala and returned to Mexico. His wife, alleged to be an important player in his corruption racket, was recently accused of living the high life in a luxury flat in Belgravia, central London, said to be worth £3.5m. She has denied this and it is understood that she has now applied for asylum in the UK.

The right-wing Peruvian novelist and politician Mario Vargas Llosa recently slammed Amlo, saying that he hoped that Mexico would not commit “suicide” by voting for him. Amlo responded that Llosa was a good writer and a bad politician, adding the caveat: “You notice I didn’t call him a great writer.”

Lopez Obrador promises if, or rather when, elected he will develop the south of the country which has been decimated by cheap US food imports, planting millions of tress for fruit and timber and creating 400,000 jobs. Old age pension will double and young people will be guaranteed scholarships and jobs after graduating. His first bill to Congress – which the candidates in his National Regeneration Movement (Morena) are also likely to win – will be to amend the constitution which prevents sitting Mexican presidents from being tried for corruption. In a country with a population of 128 million where almost half, 53.4 million, live below the poverty line, these are attractive promises.

“This party [Morena] is an instrument of the people’s struggle,” he said recently. “In union there is strength,” adding: “Mexico will produce everything it consumes. We will stop buying from abroad.” That, perhaps, is the greatest – perhaps the greatest unrealisable – promise that he has made. In campaign speeches he echoes Trump’s rhetoric, talking of "mexicanismo" – Mexico first.

So what influence has the Trump wall played in the election campaign? Surprisingly little, probably because everyone in the country opposes him. In the speech which launched his campaign, Amlo, in one for the gallery, said that “no threat, no wall, no bullying attitude from any foreign government will ever stop us from being happy in our own fatherland.”

Early in Trump’s term, Lopez Obrador did file a complaint with the Inter-American Commission on Human Rights in Washington and is pledging to take it to the UN as a human rights violation, although the US President’s contempt for the organisation is well known and it is likely to go nowhere.

Publicly he says of a future relationship with the US President: “You can’t be the President of Mexico and have a pragmatic relationship with Trump – it’s a contradiction in terms.” He adds: “Until now, Mexico has been predictable and Trump has been the one providing the surprises. I think it’s now Amlo who is going to be providing the surprises.” But behind the scenes his aides have been reaching out to Trump’s to try to forge a working relationship.

The latest polls have Amlo on between 51-54 per cent of the vote – up almost 20 points since January – and with a lead of more than 20 points over Meade. The country’s success in the World Cup – into the knockout phase – can only boost his prospects. In 1996 Harold Wilson attributed, in part, Labour’s bounce to a 96-seat victory on England's World Cup win.

Doubt him or not, Lopez Obrador is sticking to his agenda of “radical revolution”, at least until he polls close. Radical, he has said, comes from the word "roots". “And we are going to pull this corrupt regime out by its roots.”

Across the northern border, Donald Trump will be watching closely. As will the world at his Twitter feed about the result. Trump at first castigated, insulted and threatened Kim Jong-un before forging some kind of détente. Perhaps he will make nice with Amlo?