Mexicans voted on Sunday in a historic election in which two women are competing for the presidency with two opposing options: those who want a change of course and those who support the continuity of the model inherited from President Andrés Manuel López Obrador.
The elections are considered a referendum on the administration of López Obrador, who in his six years in office expanded social programs but also militarized the country and could not control insecurity, impunity or the advance of organized crime.
The candidate of the ruling Morena party, Claudia Sheinbaum, former mayor of the capital, is the favorite of the race followed by the businesswoman and former senator Xóchitl Gálvez, who heads the opposition coalition formed by a conservative party (the PAN), a leftist party (the PRD ) and the one who governed Mexico for seven decades of the 20th century (the PRI).
Neither of the two women, both 61 years old, has managed to engage with the electorate as López Obrador did six years ago, who won by more than 30 points in 2018.
On the outskirts of Mexico City, in the San Andrés Totoltepec neighborhood, housewife Stephania Navarrete, 34, watched the dozens of cameramen and election officials gathered where Sheinbaum was going to vote.
Navarrete said he planned to vote for Morena’s candidate despite his criticism of López Obrador.
“Having a female president, for me as a Mexican woman, is not going to be like before when, for the simple fact of saying that you are a woman, it limits you to certain professions. Not now,” Navarrete told The Associated Press.
He added that the social programs of López Obrador, Sheinbaum’s mentor, are crucial but that cartel violence is his main concern. “For me the biggest challenge is security. They said they were going to lower crime levels but no, it was quite the opposite, they skyrocketed. Obviously I don’t completely blame the president, but it is in a way his responsibility,” Navarrete said.
Almost 100 million Mexicans are called to vote in the largest elections in which, in addition to the presidency, the two chambers of Congress, nine of the 32 governorships and more than 19,000 local positions will be renewed.
About 675,000 Mexicans living abroad are registered to vote but in the past only a small percentage have done so. Voting is not mandatory in Mexico and participation has been around 60% in the last elections.
Polls in most of the country close at 6:00 p.m. (00:00 GMT) and the first preliminary and partial results are expected to begin flowing in at 9:00 p.m. (03:00 GMT).
Sheinbaum, a former academic, has opted for the continuity of the model, which guarantees the support of the most popular sectors – which are the electoral base of the current president – but left her little or no room for maneuver to propose adjustments to the most controversial policies. of the president.
Gálvez, a woman who boasts of having gone from selling gelatin to founding her own technology companies, presented herself as the only option to restore peace to Mexicans and focused her campaign on criticizing the president’s security strategy of “hugs, not bullets.” ”, which wants to address the causes of violence without direct confrontation with the cartels.
He also denounced that the current president’s way of governing poses a danger to democracy for wanting to suppress autonomous organizations or for his confrontations and attacks on the Judiciary.
In the capital municipality of Iztapalapa, east of the capital, Angelina Jiménez, a 76-year-old housewife, arrived at the voting center on crutches. “I came to vote to end this inept government that says that we are doing well and there are so many deaths,” she said, concerned about the situation of violence that Mexico faces. “He (López Obrador) says that we are better and it is not true. We are worse,” said the woman who anticipated that she would vote for Gálvez.
The only male presidential candidate is Jorge Álvarez Máynez, from the small Citizen Movement party, who is in a distant third place.
Pedro Saldívar Roja, a 71-year-old former pharmacist, was at the front of the line of voters in San Andrés Totoltepec with a rosary around his neck and a cane in his hand.
“It is a historic election, to vote and unite in the people’s work,” the man said, indicating that he planned to vote for Sheinbaum because of López Obrador’s social programs, especially the payments made to older Mexicans.
Morena, a party created by López Obrador ten years ago, governs in 23 of the country’s 32 states and has a simple majority in both chambers of Congress, which it now aims to expand to the two-thirds necessary to be able to reform the Constitution without the need for consensus. something that deeply worries the opposition and experts.
Political violence has multiplied during the campaign. It is not something new for Mexico, where organized crime seeks to condition candidates in states and municipalities to guarantee local control of the areas where it operates. But this year its impact has been notable with almost thirty candidates for public office murdered – according to information from the organization Data Cívica – and dozens of attacks, threats and homicides of relatives of politicians.
A mayoral candidate in Guerrero, to the south, was shot in the middle of a campaign closing rally. In Morelos, in the center of the country, or in Nuevo Laredo, on the border with the United States, organized crime posted what could be considered “electoral narco posters” to encourage people to vote for a certain candidate. And in Chiapas, a state in the midst of war between the Jalisco Cartel and the Sinaloa Cartel, unknown persons burned a local office of the electoral institute that caused no victims but did end up with all the voting paperwork turned into ashes.
More than 27,000 federal soldiers, most of them from the National Guard, have been deployed to guarantee the security of the voting, which will also be monitored, among others, by international observers from the Organization of American States.
In the economic field, Mexico enters the elections with the peso having strengthened against the dollar in recent years, mainly due to high internal interest rates and the increase in remittances sent by emigrants from the United States to thousands of corners of the country. Mexico. The average GDP growth during López Obrador’s term has been 1% annually.
