Mexico enters elections

Mexico begins the electoral campaign this Friday with a view to the presidential elections on June 2.

Except for a major surprise, a woman will be the next president for the first time in the history of the country.

Claudia Sheinbaum, representative of the ruling alliance between Morena, the Green Party and the Labor Party, is the clear favorite;

she followed by Xóchitl Gálvez, from the coalition between the PAN, on the right, the PRI, the historic Mexican party today in decline, and the PRD, the remains of the classic left.

Jorge Álvarez Máynez, from Movimiento Ciudadano, appears at a great distance, a kind of loose verse who has not wanted to join the coalition of the entire opposition.

The polls show a clear advantage towards the cherry nominee, although there are still three months in which the candidates, especially those from the opposition, will have room to bring out all their artillery.

The starting signal will be given in events called in the strongholds of each party.

Morena will do it in the Zócalo, at the foot of the National Palace;

The opposition front has chosen Guanajuato, one of the states most affected by violence in this six-year term and also governed by them;

and the orange party will do so in Lagos de Moreno, a city that was in the news last year for the brutal massacre of a group of young people in the hands of organized crime and that remains in Jalisco, one of the few entities in the hands of the Citizen Movement.

“We are going for 90 hard, arduous, intense days.”

The preview of what the coming months will be like came this Thursday from the mouth of Gálvez.

This is the final stretch of a process that aspires to be the longest in Mexican history.

Although the official start is this Friday, the candidates have already been campaigning for about nine months, including the internal ones that each alliance went through, the pre-campaign and the inter-campaign.

The remaining weeks will be crucial for the two opposition candidates, they will have to compete with the goal of turning the election around, because so far all the polls that have been carried out in the country show Sheinbaum as the winner.

If so, Morena would remain in power for 12 years, something that since the democratic opening of 2000 has only been achieved by the PAN with the consecutive governments of Vicente Fox and Felipe Calderón.

The successor of Andrés Manuel López Obrador - for now, only within Morena - has had a key factor working in her favor: the president, with overwhelming approval, has led her by the hand to the candidacy.

Sheinbaum knows that capitalizing on that positive image is the path to success, which is why he has attached himself as much as he can to the figure of the president.

So much so that he has announced that he will present this Friday his 100 government objectives, an idea that evokes the 100 promises that the president launched the day he took power more than five years ago.

His campaign has sought to blur the border that separates the two figures.

This Thursday, when the candidate presented her campaign team, the press questioned her about this similarity.

“They say I have no personality,” she said, laughing, “but I am very sure of myself.”

Sheinbaum has detailed that in the first days of the campaign he will be in Mexico City, Ciudad Juárez and Guadalajara.

The capital will be one of the nerve centers of the campaign.

Not only because the now presidential candidate is the former head of government, but because Mexico City is shaping up to be a tough battle.

The official candidate leads the polls but the opposition is strong and threatens to be able to carry out the coup.

“Every week we will announce one of the proposals,” Sheinbaum said this Thursday at a press conference.

She has also explained that she plans to hold two or three events every day, have meetings with different sectors and at least one meeting with the press.

He has even considered the possibility of doing something similar to López Obrador's morning session, an idea that Gálvez has been using for weeks.

Gálvez, the candidate without a party

For the candidate of the opposition front, on the contrary, sticking to the past presidents of the PAN has worked against her in the campaign.

The last episode was a photo with Felipe Calderón (2006-2012) that was taken on tour in Spain.

When the controversy arose, she ended up distancing herself from the former president.

“I don't admire him politically,” she later clarified.

Gálvez has chosen to begin this Friday morning a tour of three entities in the north—Zacatecas, Aguascalientes and Guanajuato—one of the most affected by insecurity.

“I'm going to start at 12 at night in Fresnillo, which is the municipality where people are most afraid in the country,” he explained a few days ago.

He will do it to send a “message of hope to Mexicans that this long night of violence will end because we are going to confront the criminals.”

Gálvez, a senator licensed by the PAN, is a particular case.

During her political career she has held positions in PAN governments, but she is not affiliated with the party.

She usually sells her independence and transversality as one of her main assets.

At the start of the campaign, she is expected to be accompanied by the leaders of the three parties she represents, with whom she has had some friction at the beginning of her candidacy.

Especially with the PRI, which ruled the country for more than 70 years and is going through unstoppable decline, increasingly swallowed up by the rise of Morena.

Gálvez will share some destinations with Sheinbaum in the first days of the campaign, such as Mexico City and Guadalajara.

But you will also visit Querétaro, Toluca and Mérida.

Although it will only have two or one event per day, according to the agenda released so far.

The candidate assured this Thursday that the axes of her campaign will be security, health, water and the economy.

Either of the two candidates do not represent, in any case, any surprise compared to other recent elections in the region.

For example, the case of Argentina and the rise to power of the far-right Javier Milei.

Third on the ballot on June 2 will be Álvarez Máynez, the injured candidate.

His candidacy was not in the initial plans of Movimiento Ciudadano, which first tried to send Samuel García, the governor of Nuevo León.

Given the possibility that the opposition would stay with the state government in the absence of García, the orange party decided to remove him from the race, even though he aspired to get at least a double-digit figure.

The scuffle ended up leaving the party in a bad way, which chose the deputy as its representative in the presidential fight.

The polls, however, have not been generous to the only man in the race.

The kindest ones give him just 5% or 6% of voting intention.

Álvarez Máynez and his party have tried to sell the idea that they are the new politics, as opposed to the usual politicians.

But the setbacks suffered, such as the leak of a video in which he is seen partying and cursing, left them in a bad light.

They have failed to rebound since then.

The candidate's electoral agenda will begin this weekend in Sonora, with a

brunch

with young people, a meeting with agricultural laborers, and then a sports activity again with young people, the electorate they most hope to conquer.

The first collective stop in the campaign that starts this Friday will be April 7, the date on which the three contenders will participate in the first presidential debate.

Then they will have two more meetings, on April 28 and May 19.

What remains until the definition will now be without the restrictions they dealt with in the last nine months, when it was not legal to campaign and they had a hard time - mainly Morena and the opposition front - being denounced before the electoral referee.

For the next 90 days, surely intense, as Gálvez has said, the countdown begins.

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