Mexico has begun the electoral campaign that will lead to the most interesting result in its history: a woman will be elected president on June 2, something unprecedented in all of North America.
The political combat will be fought by Claudia Sheinbaum, who replaces the current president in the Morena party, and Xóchitl Gálvez, who heads the alliance that brings together the right-wing PAN, the bloodless PRI and the minority and leftist PRD.
In this race, Sheinbaum starts with 30 points above her rival in the most advantageous polls, a bar that is difficult to overcome.
Citizens are satisfied with the thousands of social aid and scholarships received in recent years and the opposition is unable to break that wall.
So much so that candidate Gálvez pricked her finger live at the opening of her campaign and with her blood she sealed in a document the commitment not to tear down the social supports that today alleviate the country's poverty a little.
Before a notary and before thousands of followers.
Such a spectacle suggests the opposition's fear that Mexicans will renew their trust for another six years in the National Regeneration Movement (Morena) that Sheinbaum currently champions, which could ensure that the country definitively escapes the reins of the PRI and the recurring alternation with PAN governments for decades.
The inertia of the enormous victory that Andrés Manuel López Obrador and his so-called Fourth Mexican Transformation won in 2018 has not diminished and is what allows a candidate to navigate comfortably in whose program—even her political gestures—she is committed to “consolidating the path advanced by the president” in the current six-year term.
His legacy, however, has lights and shadows.
The biggest failure has been the fight against violence, with an average of 100 deaths per day, which will exceed the total number of the previous six-year term.
It is not for nothing that the opposition's slogan reads
For a Mexico without fear
, and candidate Gálvez will take this chapter that is bleeding the country dry at the center of her campaign.
She opened the electoral race in Fresnillo, Zacatecas, the city with the highest perception of insecurity in the country.
It was a symbolic but brief first blow, to later move to Irapuato, a municipality in the State of Guanajuato, one of those with the highest rates of violence, but which is governed by the PAN, its coreligionists, who supported it massively at the opening of the campaign. .
Xóchitl Gálvez walks through the streets of Fresnillo (State of Zacatecas), this Friday at dawn. Gladys Serrano
Sheinbaum filled the capital's Zócalo, the largest square in Latin America, the National Palace where the charismatic president lives, guarding his back, in a symbolic gesture that shows where the wind that moves his ship comes from.
There he reeled off 100 government promises on Friday afternoon that hardly deviate from what was already implemented in this last six-year term.
The economy is one of the main assets of the official candidate because the country boasts these days of having laid the foundations for a hopeful future, with a strong currency, robust foreign investments that foresee an increase in employment and exports that are going well thanks to the enormous market above the Rio Grande, United States, with whom relations are friendly and focused on the fight against drug trafficking and stopping migration.
There is a third candidate for these presidential elections, Jorge Álvarez Máynez, but his political strength is irrelevant.
Citizen Movement has been presenting itself for years as the third way for those who do not find accommodation in any of the majority blocs, which they have described as “the old politics.”
They achieved some notable positions in the country in previous elections, but their campaign has been marked by setbacks and mishaps that have opened waterways that are impossible to plug.
Hence, whoever will occupy the highest chair in Mexico, barring imponderables, will be a woman.
Claudia Sheinbaum, 61, comes from that academic middle class that makes the revolution in universities.
The candidate was employed in those struggles decades ago and today she proclaims that her government will be “of the people, for the people and by the people.”
Mexican humanism, they have called it, a cocktail to combat poverty based on eliminating innumerable sources of corruption and privileges amassed in past and recent times.
A large distribution of social aid and scholarships has reduced poverty in recent years and generated enormous sympathies for the president's transformation movement, but corruption still has deep roots.
And those on the left reproach the government for not daring to make a tax reform that taxes large fortunes and redistributes wealth.
These are the duties that remain pending for Sheinbaum.
The Zócalo of Mexico City during Claudia Sheinbaum's campaign kick-off event.Mónica González Islas
Xóchitl Gálvez, also 61 years old, has exhibited rural and indigenous origins.
She represents a self-made woman who left her hometown to study in the capital, scaring away her shortcomings as best she could.
She became a successful businesswoman, so today she values her merit and effort without taking much into account her luck or her birth.
She jumped into the presidential race as an independent senator who nevertheless sat on the benches of the PAN, the most right-wing party in the Mexican Congress, with which she does not identify much, as she says.
It carries on its back the weight of an unnatural coalition of parties that have always looked askance at each other and now have no choice but to join forces to even glimpse a decent result that could inconvenience the party in government, which needs a large majority to complete. ambitious policies.
The elections on June 2 will also be to define the color of thousands of City Councils, the Congress and the Senate and eight state governorships, and also the head of Government of Mexico City, a huge granary of votes and the most symbolic square in the entire country, catapult on numerous occasions for the future president, as may happen now if Sheinbaum achieves power after his time as mayor of the capital.
In Mexico City, the polls also favor the president's party and his headliner, another woman, Clara Brugada, with great pedigree in labor and social struggles.
But those from Morena express some concern about what may happen in the capital, where in the 2021 midterm elections they suffered a huge loss of delegations, which were left in the hands of the right.
A bad result, even if it is a winner, could affect the electoral performance of the Morenistas throughout the country.
Mexico has been immersed for months in a long pre-campaign where, in the absence of intermediate parties, the elections are played between the right and the left, although these concepts are saying a lot for a country that still exudes the ideological lack of definition imposed by the PRI for decades.
Subscribe to the EL PAÍS México newsletter
and the
electoral WhatsApp
channel and receive all the key information on current events in this country.
Subscribe to continue reading
Read without limits
Keep reading
I am already a subscriber
_