Mexico’s federal electoral court determined on Thursday that President Andrés Manuel López Obrador committed gender-based political violence against opponent Xóchitl Gálvez in eight morning conferences in July and August 2023, when she was still a presidential candidate for the June 2 elections. .
According to the court, Gálvez obtained the candidacy by decision of a group of people with political power and that constitutes “symbolic violence in order to undermine the recognition of her political rights, based on her character as a woman and indigenous, by reinforcing the stereotype of inferiority or dependence to access public positions.”
The pronouncement is merely symbolic because the president cannot be sanctioned for electoral infractions, the court added.
López Obrador said on multiple occasions that Gálvez – the presidential candidate for an opposition coalition – had been appointed to that position by decision of powerful media outlets and businessmen who were enemies of the government he represented.
The opposition parties denounced that the president had used the morning conferences, a daily communication space for the president, to conduct an electoral campaign from power, which questioned the fairness of the contest.
Hours later, Gálvez announced that he presented a challenge to the June 2 electoral process at the National Electoral Institute (INE) on Thursday to investigate and sanction the intervention of López Obrador and organized crime in the general elections.
“I ask for exemplary punishment and public scolding” for the president, said on her X account, formerly Twitter, the opposition senator who ruled out that the action seeks to annul the election that the official candidate Claudia Sheinbaum won with almost 36 million votes.
Gálvez denounced that during the electoral process the State apparatus was used to promote Sheinbaum.
The opposition candidate expressed that she will ask that the use of public resources in the campaign be investigated “because the president presented the social programs as his own.”
