The front-runner is Claudia Sheinbaum, 61, a former mayor of Mexico City who is polling double digits ahead of rival Xochitl Gálvez. Sheinbaum has pledged to continue the policies of President Andrés Manuel López Obrador, founder of the Morena party and a longtime leftist icon (who is constitutionally barred from running for re-election).
Here are the presidential candidates. Sunday's vote will also elect a new Congress, Mexico City's mayor, eight governors and more than 20,000 local officials in Mexico's 31 states and the capital.
Sheinbaum grew up in Mexico City, the daughter of a left-wing scientist whose family was close to Raul Alvarez Garin, a leader of the 1968 pro-democracy protests that were brutally crushed by security forces. As a girl, Sheinbaum would bring food to him in prison with her parents, she said in interviews for her book, “Claudia Sheinbaum: The President.”
Disciplined and driven, Scheinbaum followed in her mother's footsteps, the biologist Annie Pardo, into science. She earned a PhD in electrical engineering from UNAM, Mexico's traditional leadership school, and then did postdoctoral work at the University of California, Berkeley, for several years in the 1990s.
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She has published dozens of academic papers on energy, environment and sustainable development, and was a contributor to the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change report that won the Nobel Peace Prize in 2007.
If elected, Sheinbaum would be the first Jewish head of state in Mexico's majority Catholic country. She remembers celebrating holidays like Yom Kippur with her grandparents, who fled discrimination and Nazi persecution in their native Bulgaria and Lithuania, but she is not religious herself.
As a student, Sheinbaum became involved in university politics, helping to lead a successful strike at Mexico's National University in 1987 against rising tuition fees and stricter admissions requirements. She married student leader Carlos Imaz, and their house became a meeting place for left-wing politicians, including Lopez Obrador, who became mayor of Mexico City in 2000 as the country completed its transition from a one-party state to a democracy. He invited Sheinbaum to become his environment minister.
In 2004, Ms. Sheinbaum's family was rocked by scandal when a video was released showing her husband, a Mexico City official, accepting cash payments from a corrupt businessman. Mr. Imaz was charged with violating election laws but was later acquitted. The couple eventually divorced.
In 2015, Mr. Sheinbaum became mayor of Tlalpan, a borough in southern Mexico City. Three years later, after Mr. Lopez Obrador won the presidential election, he was elected mayor of the capital. He is known as a meticulous problem-solver and a staunch, if reserved, ally of the president.
Sheinbaum has pledged to follow Lopez Obrador's policies of increasing aid to poor Mexicans and strengthening the government's role in the energy sector, but he also wants to shift the country toward renewable energy and rely more on the police and National Guard, rather than the military, to reduce violence and crime.
Sheinbaum and Imaz have two children, one an academic living in the United States and the other an artist. In November, Sheinbaum married her college friend, Jesús María Tariba, an economic risk analyst.
Galvez, 61, heads a coalition of center-right and center-left opposition parties. She is an outspoken business executive who built her political career with the conservative National Action Party (PAN).
Gálvez grew up in a rural town in central Hidalgo state, the daughter of an Otomi indigenous father and a mixed-race mother. She has put her life story at the center of her campaign. As a girl, Gálvez sold jelly cups and tamales on the street to help support her family. She says her father, a teacher, drank heavily and abused her mother, a stay-at-home mom (both have since died).
At age 16, Gálvez moved alone to Mexico City, rented an attic apartment in a working-class neighborhood, began working as a telephone operator, and soon enrolled at UNAM to study computer engineering.
Galvez has founded two technology companies that contribute to the design and maintenance of “intelligent” energy-efficient buildings.
In 2000, PAN's new president, Vicente Fox, appointed her to head the federal committee overseeing indigenous issues. She was eventually elected leader of Mexico City's Miguel Hidalgo district and, in 2018, to the Mexican Senate.
Galvez has been known to wear traditional indigenous dress and travel around Mexico City by bicycle. In June 2023, she drew attention by showing up at the presidential palace and demanding to be present at Lopez Obrador's daily morning press conference. She wanted to refute his accusations that she supports the elimination of government pensions for the elderly.
He refused to let her enter the country, sparking a spat in which Galvez became known for her witty, sometimes vulgar, retorts. She has portrayed herself as a woman who is unafraid of a powerful president and has “courage” to stand up to organized crime.
She campaigned on fighting crime, strengthening government oversight agencies established during the democratic transition, and strengthening ties with the United States to attract more companies to produce closer to the U.S. market.
Galvez and her longtime partner, Ruben Sanchez, a business executive turned musician, have two adult children.
Minez, 38, is an unlikely candidate representing a small but growing party called the Civic Movement, a congressman who has focused on the youth vote and positioned himself as the only candidate who can change “old Mexican politics.”
Mr. Mines grew up in the northern state of Zacatecas and earned a degree in international relations from the Western Polytechnic Institute, a Jesuit university. At age 25, he became a state legislator for the long-ruling Institutional Revolutionary Party (PRI). Three years later, he resigned from the PRI to join the centrist Civic Movement.
He entered the presidential race in January after the party's most popular candidate, Samuel Garcia, governor of the northern state of Nuevo Leon, dropped out.
Mynes says he would reduce reliance on the military to fight organized crime, establish a legal and regulated marijuana market and shift state-run oil and power companies to renewable energy.
Rios reported from Monterrey, Mexico. Gabriela Martinez contributed to this report.
