A Historic First for Mexico as Two Women Vie for the Presidency

Mexico’s governing occasion selected Claudia Sheinbaum, a former mayor of Mexico City, as its candidate in subsequent yr’s presidential election on Wednesday, making a watershed second on the planet’s largest Spanish-speaking nation, with voters anticipated to decide on for the primary time between two main candidates who’re girls.

“Today democracy won. Today the people of Mexico decided,” Ms. Sheinbaum stated throughout the announcement, including that her occasion, Morena, would win the 2024 election. “Tomorrow begins the electoral process,” she stated. “And there is no minute to lose.”

Ms. Sheinbaum, 61, a physicist with a doctorate in environmental engineering and a protégé of Mexico’s present president, Andrés Manuel López Obrador, will face off in opposition to the opposition’s prime contender, Xóchitl Gálvez, 60, an outspoken engineer with Indigenous roots who rose from poverty to develop into a tech entrepreneur.

“We can already say today: Mexico, by the end of next year, will be governed by a woman,” stated Jesús Silva-Herzog Márquez, a political scientist at Mexico’s Monterrey Institute of Technology, including that it was an “extraordinary change” for the nation.

Ms. Sheinbaum has constructed her political profession largely within the shadow of Mr. López Obrador, and had emerged early on because the occasion’s favored decide to succeed the present president. That connection is believed to present her a vital edge heading into subsequent yr’s election because of the excessive approval rankings loved by Mr. López Obrador, who is restricted by Mexico’s Constitution to 1 six-year time period.

In latest months, Mr. López Obrador has insisted that he’ll maintain no affect as soon as he finishes his time period. “I am going to retire completely,” he stated in March. “I am not a chieftain, much less do I feel irreplaceable. I am not a strongman; I am not a messiah.”

But some analysts say his affect will endure no matter which candidate wins in 2024. Should Ms. Sheinbaum win, “there may be changes to certain policies, though the broad strokes of his agenda will remain intact,” based on a latest report by the Center for Strategic and International Studies, a analysis institute in Washington

If she is defeated, Mr. López Obrador “will not fade quietly into the background,” the report stated, citing a big base of loyal supporters permitting him to command substantial affect. Some legacies of his administration — together with austerity measures or the immersion of the army into social, safety and infrastructure roles — may be obstacles for Ms. Gálvez if she seeks to roll again his insurance policies.

As the 2 feminine candidates goal weaknesses in one another’s campaigns, they share some similarities. While neither are explicitly feminist, each are socially progressive, have engineering levels and say they may preserve broadly fashionable antipoverty applications.

Both girls additionally assist decriminalizing abortion. In Ms. Gálvez’s case, that place stands in distinction to that of her conservative occasion. Mexico’s Supreme Court on Wednesday decriminalized abortion nationwide, constructing on an earlier ruling giving officers the authority to permit the process on a state-by-state foundation.

Ms. Sheinbaum, who was born to Jewish mother and father in Mexico City, would develop into Mexico’s first Jewish president if she wins the race. She has confronted a misinformation marketing campaign on social media claiming falsely that she was born in Bulgaria, the nation from which her mom emigrated; supporters of Ms. Sheinbaum have known as this effort antisemitic.

She studied physics and vitality engineering in Mexico earlier than finishing up her doctoral analysis at California’s Lawrence Berkeley National Laboratory. After coming into politics, she grew to become Mr. López Obrador’s prime environmental official when he was mayor of Mexico City.

When Ms. Sheinbaum herself was elected mayor of the capital in 2018, she took on public transit and environmental points as prime priorities, however was additionally the goal of criticism over deadly mishaps within the metropolis’s transportation techniques, together with the collapse of a metro overpass during which 26 individuals had been killed.

With polls positioning Ms. Sheinbaum because the front-runner, her ties to Mr. López Obrador required self-discipline to take care of his assist even when she might not have agreed along with his selections. For occasion, when Mr. López Obrador minimized the coronavirus pandemic and federal authorities officers tweaked information to keep away from a lockdown in Mexico City, she remained silent.

“What has stood out is her loyalty, I think a blind loyalty, to the president,” stated Mr. Silva-Herzog Márquez, the political scientist.

Still, whereas hewing to Mr. López Obrador’s insurance policies, Ms. Sheinbaum has additionally signaled some potential modifications, notably expressing assist for renewable vitality sources.

Drawing a distinction along with her rival, Ms. Gálvez, a senator who usually will get round Mexico City on an electrical bicycle, has centered on her origins because the daughter of an Indigenous Otomí father and a mestiza mom.

Ms. Gálvez grew up in a small city about two hours from Mexico City with out working water and talking her father’s Hñähñu language. After receiving a scholarship to the National Autonomous University of Mexico, she grew to become an engineer and based an organization that designs communications and vitality networks for workplace buildings.

After Vicente Fox received the presidency in 2000, she was appointed as head of the presidential workplace for Indigenous peoples. In 2018, Ms. Gálvez was elected senator representing the conservative National Action Party.

Mr. López Obrador has repeatedly made her the main target of verbal assaults, which has had the impact of elevating her profile across the nation whereas highlighting the sway that the president and his occasion exert throughout Mexico.

A combative chief who has embraced austerity measures whereas doubling down on Mexico’s reliance on fossil fuels, Mr. López Obrador looms over the campaigning. He pledged to cast off a long-held political custom whereby Mexican presidents handpicked their successors with their “big finger,” changing the apply with nationwide voter surveys.

Historically, political events in Mexico largely chosen their candidates in ways in which had been opaque and lacked a lot inclusion. Handpicking was extra widespread than a “free and fair competition for a candidacy,” stated Flavia Freidenberg, a political scientist on the National Autonomous University of Mexico.

The new choice course of has modified that custom, however considerations persist over a scarcity of readability and different irregularities which have been denounced by some analysts and different presidential hopefuls. Both the governing occasion, Morena, and the broad opposition coalition, known as the Broad Front for Mexico, used public opinion polls “that have not been fully transparent,” Ms. Freidenberg added, “and are not necessarily considered democratic procedures.”

The new procedures additionally ignored federal marketing campaign rules, with these on the helm of the method in each the governing occasion and the opposition transferring the choice ahead by a couple of months and cryptically calling Ms. Sheinbaum and Ms. Gálvez “coordinators” of every coalition as a substitute of “candidates.”

“These irregular activities have occurred under the gaze of public opinion, the political class and the electoral authorities,” Ms. Freidenberg stated. “This is not a minor issue.”

Next yr’s basic election, during which voters will elect not solely a president however members of Congress, may also decide whether or not Mexico might return to a dominant-party system — just like what the nation skilled beneath the once-hegemonic Institutional Revolutionary Party, which held uninterrupted energy for 71 years till 2000.

Despite some setbacks, there are indicators that is already taking place. In June, Morena’s candidate received the governor’s race within the State of Mexico, the nation’s most populous state, defeating the Institutional Revolutionary Party’s candidate.

That victory introduced the variety of states beneath Morena’s management to 23 out of 32 states, up from simply seven at first of the president’s time period in 2018.

The query is “whether Morena reconfigures itself into a hegemonic party like the old PRI,” stated Ana Laura Magaloni, a regulation professor who suggested Ms. Sheinbaum’s mayoral marketing campaign. “And that depends on how much of a fight the opposition can put up.”