Presidential candidate Claudia Scheinbaum arrives at her final campaign rally in the Zocalo in Mexico City, Wednesday, May 29, 2024. (AP Photo/Eduardo Verdugo)
MEXICO CITY (AP) — Voters choosing Mexico's next president will choose Sunday between a former academic who promises to carry forward the current president's populist policies and a former senator and tech entrepreneur who vows to step up the fight against deadly drug cartels.
Nearly 100 million people are registered to vote in the election to choose a successor to outgoing President Andrés Manuel López Obrador, who could become Mexico's first female president. Voters will also elect governors in nine of the country's 32 states, candidates for both houses of Congress, and thousands of mayors and other local offices.
The election is widely seen as a referendum on President Andres Manuel Lopez Obrador, a populist who has expanded social programs but has done little to curb Mexico's drug cartel violence. His Morena party currently holds 23 of the country's 32 state governorships and a majority in both houses of Congress. Mexico's constitution bars the president from running for reelection.
Morena wants to secure the two-thirds majority needed in Congress to amend the constitution to eliminate an oversight agency that he sees as cumbersome and wasteful, something the opposition, in a loose coalition government, say would endanger Mexico's democratic institutions.
Both of the presidential candidates are women, both of whom would be Mexico's first female presidents. A third candidate, Jorge Álvarez Minez, from a smaller party, is far behind.
Mexico City Mayor Claudia Sheinbaum is running for the Morena party and is leading the race, promising to continue all of Lopez Obrador's policies, including universal pensions for the elderly and apprenticeship allowances for young people.
Opposition presidential candidate Xochitl Galvez, whose father is an indigenous Otomi, rose from selling snacks on the streets of her impoverished hometown to start her own technology company. The candidate for the main opposition coalition left the Senate last year to voice her anger at President Lopez Obrador's “hugs, not guns” policy, which seeks to avoid a confrontation with drug cartels. She has vowed to go after criminals more aggressively.
Continuing cartel violence and Mexico's mediocre economic performance are major concerns for voters.
The Mexican peso has strengthened against the dollar in recent years, mainly due to higher domestic interest rates and a surge in migrant remittances, but gross domestic product has only grown an average of 1% annually under the current president.
President Lopez Obrador has claimed to have reduced the country's all-time high murder rate by 20% since taking office in December 2018. But that's a claim based largely on shaky interpretations of statistics, and the actual murder rate appears to have only fallen by around 4% in six years.
About 675,000 Mexicans living abroad are registered to vote, although very few have actually done so in the past. Voting is not compulsory in Mexico, and overall voter turnout has hovered around 60% in recent elections. This is comparable to turnout in recent U.S. presidential elections. The exception was 2020, when the U.S. voter turnout for the showdown between then-President Donald Trump and future President Joe Biden was 67%, the highest in decades.
Just as the planned rematch between Biden and Trump in November has highlighted deep divisions in the United States, Sunday's election revealed how deeply polarized public opinion is in Mexico over the country's direction, including security strategy and how to grow the economy.
Beyond the fight for control of Congress, the races for Mexico City's highest office, now considered equivalent to a state governorship, are also important — Sheinbaum is just the latest in a long line of Mexico City mayors, including Lopez Obrador, who later ran for president. Governorships in the larger, more populous states of Veracruz and Jalisco are also attracting attention.
Polling will begin at 8 am in most parts of the country and close at 6 pm. The first preliminary partial results are expected to be announced by 9 pm after the final votes in various time zones close.
