Is AMLO a Leftist? Is Ebrard?

In response to reports that Ebrard said he was not a leftist a little over a decade ago, Jorge Fernández Menéndez says neither is AMLO, and that it doesn't really matter anyway:

Who cares if Marcelo Ebrard is of the left of the center? Furthermore, who can identify today where the left, center, and right are located in the political spectrum? Personally I have always believed, for exampled, that Andrés Manuel López Obrador is a conservative reactionary: his discourse can be very nationalistic; his opposition to the government, very loud; his denunciations of "the mafia that stole power from us", insistent, but that doesn't make him a man of the left, much less that he sympathizes with the Cuban regime or Hugo Chávez, [both of whom are] as authoritarian as the Tabascan.

You could say that being of the left or not is defined by the attitude toward private capital. It's partially true and Ebrard recognizes that he wants an open economy, but continuing with our comparison, it's not that AMLO hasn't don't business with the private sector: he denounce the "mafia" as a group of economic power group, but he has worked a great deal with other groups. I remember, in his registration as a presidential candidate in 2006, how in the first row of guests were the construction executives that did so much business with the DF government then.

For what it's worth, Ebrard is also far more socially liberal than AMLO.