Mexico already has its president. Now yes, for the first time in 200 years of independence. Claudia Sheinbaum Pardo (Mexico City, 61 years old) is the first woman to win a presidential election and she has done so on a historic day that has yielded an overwhelming victory for the government party. With a participation close to 61%, the president’s successor has achieved between 58.6% and 60.7% of the votes cast, according to the quick count, a mathematical extrapolation of samples collected throughout the country. The percentage obtained exceeds the 53% that Andrés Manuel López Obrador achieved in 2018, quite an achievement for a candidate with less political charisma, but who benefits from the influence of the popular leader. There was a lot of questioning at this time about whether a sexist country like Mexico was prepared to have a female president. The polls have given a resounding yes.
As the polls tenaciously predicted, the president’s successor has won by more than 30 points compared to her opponent, Xóchitl Gálvez, who has achieved between 26% and 28%. The candidate of the opposition coalition, in which the two traditional parties, the PRI and the PAN, together with the minority PRD, have fought together, has not been able to with the tsunami of support that has decided to give continuity to the National Regeneration Movement (Morena) , and congratulated Sheinbaum after knowing the first official results. She has described it as a “historical milestone” to have a woman as president for the first time, but she has warned that she will continue to defend her policies by “going out into the streets as many times as necessary.” The third candidate, Jorge Álvarez Máynez, who ran for Movimiento Ciudadano, a party of vague centrism, was satisfied with around 10% of the votes cast.
The capital has also given a large victory to the left-wing candidate, Clara Brugada, who obtains between 9 and 12 points above her rival, the PAN member Santiago Taboada. The election in Mexico City presented a more uncertain result, even even between the two. It hasn’t been like that. The great advantage between one and the other leaves no room for challenges or courts, as Taboada had promised in the event of a difference between the two of less than five points.
“Mexicans have recognized the results, convictions and will of our project,” Sheinbaum said after midnight, in his first intervention after learning of the victory. “Mexico has shown that it is a democratic country with peaceful elections,” he added. Immediately afterwards, he thanked the calls received from his opponents, recognizing his victory. And she was pleased to be the first woman to become president: “I’m not here alone, we’re all there,” she said. She has promised to govern for each and every citizen. “We will walk in peace and harmony for a more prosperous and just country.”
The triumph has been overwhelming, overwhelming. Sheinbaum has celebrated the qualified majority achieved together with his partners from the Green Party and the Labor Party in Congress and “more than likely in the Senate”, which will allow him to have almost omnipotent power. Not just her. President López Obrador will have one month between when Congress is installed – on September 1 – and the succession – October 1 – to approve the pending reforms, for which two-thirds of the Chambers are required, since they imply reforms constitutional.
López Obrador himself was the first to congratulate his successor. “With affection and respect,” he said in a video in which he celebrated the victory of Sheinbaum, “a winner by a wide margin, the first president of Mexico” and possibly, he added, who has gotten the most votes in the entire history of the country. in a presidential election. “I congratulate all Mexicans, the name of Mexico is on high,” he stated. Some time before (the results were known around midnight), congratulations had already begun to arrive from leaders of other Latin American countries, such as Colombia, Gustavo Petro; Honduras, Guatemala, as well as the president of the OAS, Luis Almagro. The president of Spain, Pedro Sánchez, also congratulated Sheinbaum.
The PRI has become the fourth political force, a debacle that has been brewing for some time, election after election. What was once the only party in Mexico is bleeding little by little, although it endures the pull in the face of continuous omens of complete disappearance. In recent months, many of its senators have left its ranks and these weeks of the campaign it has also endured some significant losses that have gone to other parties. The Greens, with as bad a reputation as the PRI itself among citizens, have, however, obtained better results in Congress. It was expected that the Citizen Movement could strike and take away its meager forces from the PRI, but that has not been the case. The “old politics,” as this party has called it, resists.
These elections have also submitted to citizen election the governorships of eight States and the assemblies of the 32, as well as the composition of the federal legislative chambers and the mayoralties of the entire country, in total, more than 20,000 public positions have passed through the polls. . Of a census of 98 million voters, 15 of them were of age to vote for the first time.
Sheinbaum, a university activist in her youth, a doctor in Physics and head of government of the capital before aspiring to the presidency, has achieved a second term for the National Regeneration Movement (Morena), the party in whose founding she participated. With a balance of eight homicides between the day before and election day and after a campaign in which 37 candidates have been murdered, Mexicans have spoken clearly. Gone are the years in which the PRI and the PAN alternated in power. Sheinbaum will be, in fact, the first person to reach the presidency without having either a PRI or PAN background. Now there is a new party that has com
e to stay and modify the political landscape of Mexico.
The popularity of the president, who maintains a rating of 60% at the end of his term, has boosted the results in favor of his candidate, who in recent months has also been gaining her own sympathies among the population, touring the country from top to bottom. below. The closing of her campaign, in the capital’s Zócalo last Wednesday, was a party for followers who were already announcing the expected result. The opposition presented these elections as a plebiscite against López Obrador, a dangerous strategy that has also proven to be unsuccessful. Xóchitl Gálvez began his journey with temperance, ensuring that he did not intend to destroy what had gone before, but rather that he would leave what worked and improve what was causing problems. But in recent weeks, the electoral message turned towards a kind of political apocalypse in which Mexico was presented as being at risk of losing democracy and ruining institutions, something that was not felt on the streets and that citizens did not want. validate. Quite the contrary, they have chosen to continue for six more years a leftist Administration that maintains its motto: “For the good of all, the poor first.”
Millions of families have improved their economic conditions in the last six years through increases in retirement pensions, scholarships for students, disability aid and a minimum wage that has increased on average by 20% annually, well above of the CPI, something never seen in previous Administrations. In a still heavily impoverished country, that connection with the government has resulted in a new mandate of the same nature. The economic boom in which Mexico is developing has won out over concerns about the violence that the country is going through, with more than 30,000 murders annually. In February, a historical record in foreign direct investment was announced, which exceeded 36 billion in 2023. The remittances sent by migrants to their families have been breaking one ceiling after another and that supports entire towns. Overtaking China, Mexico has become the main exporter to the United States, its great trading partner. The relocation of companies from the giant north of the Rio Grande to Mexican territory also predicts a rain of jobs.
López Obrador’s incontestable victory in 2018, with 53% of the votes cast, left the opposition reeling for much of the six-year term, beheaded and without proposals. Only in July of last year, a smiling and cheerful woman, who wore flowery huipils and rode a bicycle, renewed the spirit and hopes of the traditional parties, who removed their discredited leaders to make way for this businesswoman of humble rural origins, who set herself up to become an engineer. The PAN and the PRI, lifelong intimate enemies, have been forced to renew their alliance and share a candidate to get ahead in these elections. But unity has not been strength, quite the contrary, Gálvez has had to fight in his campaign against the interference of the parties and the public missteps of his leaders. She, who has presumed her ideological independence, needed them to win votes in the territories and in turn repudiated them when they put obstacles in her way. The first of the three presidential debates broadcast left a bad taste in the candidate’s mouth, who came to say that between them they were stealing her air. She slammed the table: “I’m going to be me and if they want me as I am, go ahead.” She showed the difficulties of rowing with so many different parties in the same boat. She has fought until the end, but it has not been possible.
Mexico was waiting for a president, the polls only had to name her name and they have already given it. Claudia Sheinbaum will take the reins of the country from next October 1, when López Obrador hands her the presidential sash.
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