Eighty-nine percent of Mexicans have a “bad” or “very bad” impression of President Donald Trump, according to a mid-January poll from BGC-Excelsior. Only 3 percent said they have a “good” or “very good” impression of the new U.S. president.
That’s not surprising considering one of Trump’s most often-repeated campaign promises ― to build a wall on the border between the U.S. and Mexico ― could become a reality after he issued executive orders on Wednesday. As a result, Mexican President Enrique Peña Nieto is rethinking a meeting with Trump that was scheduled to take place in Washington next week.
Not to be outdone, Trump has mulled cancelling the meeting as well.
Mexicans expected such a divide between the two leaders ― in the same poll, 59 percent said they expect relations between Trump and Nieto to go badly. Twenty percent thought the relationship would go well when the poll was conducted January 12-13, 2017. That number is likely to dip if the two leaders don’t meet next week, or if the meeting goes badly.
Global polling from Ipsos confirms the findings of the BGC-Excelsior poll. Eighty-one percent of Mexicans think Trump will be a bad president in that survey, the second-highest of the 24 countries polled. Only Spain ― at 84 percent ― had a higher proportion of its respondents report Trump would be a bad president.
Russia had the most positive views of Trump, with 74 percent saying he’d be a good president.
The BGC-Excelsior telephone poll was conducted by BGC, Beltrán, Juárez y Asociados on Jan. 12-13, 2017 of 400 adults in Mexico. The margin of error is +/- 5 percentage points, and the pollsters note that the telephone survey tends to reflect more the opinion of the population with higher income and education.
The Ipsos global poll was conducted online between Dec. 23, 2016 and Jan. 7, 2017. There were 500 respondents from Mexico, 1001 respondents in Spain and 501 respondents in Russia. The Mexican and Russian segments have credible intervals (similar to a margin of error) of +/- 5 percentage points, and the Spain sample has a credible interval of +/- 3.5 percentage points.