With a resounding victory, the Mexican left has managed to retain its bastion this Sunday. Mexico City has elected Clara Brugada, from the National Regeneration Movement (Morena), as its head of government for the next six years. The elected candidate has won with between 49% and 52% of the votes over her main rival, the PAN member Santiago Taboada, of the Va por CDMX alliance, who obtained between 37% and 40% of the votes, according to the quick count, a calculation with samples collected in several boxes that has 95% confidence. Salomón Chertorivski, from Movimiento Ciudadano, has come in a distant third place, with between 6% and 9%. In elections in which Mexico has elected Claudia Sheinbaum as the first female president, the capital has given resounding support for continuity. The idea that the ruling party repeated so much in the campaign, “it is time for women,” has finally come to fruition. With Sheinbaum in the Presidency and Brugada in Mexico City, the duo of the National Palace and the local Executive will be in the hands, for the first time, of two left-wing women.
“The majority has decided to vote to continue the transformation of Mexico,” celebrated the elected head of Government, after an almost problem-free day and with a high participation, around 68% of registered capital residents, almost 8 points above of the presidential election. Taboada, who represented the historic National Action Party (PAN), Institutional Revolutionary Party (PRI) and the Democratic Revolution Party (PRD), acknowledged defeat shortly after the dissemination of the first official data late in the morning. “This time, on this occasion, it wasn’t enough for us,” she said when recognizing her opponent’s victory, “we left everything on the court, we didn’t leave anything behind.” The opposition coalition candidate has wished Brugada success and has assured that he will continue working for the future of the city. Crossing data from the head of government with the federal race shows that Taboada was much more successful in the election than her alliance partner, presidential candidate Xóchitl Gálvez, who lost by about 30 points.
After almost three decades at the head of the capital’s government, the left faced in these elections a strengthened right in the capital, which threatened to take power from it. Unlike the presidential elections, where polls indicated a broad victory for Morena, the race in the city was expected to be closer. The clearest precedent was the 2021 midterms, when the capital’s residents punished Andrés Manuel López Obrador’s party at the polls and gave the opposition more than half of the 16 mayoralties that make up the city. The gap between the two favorites was closing as the event approached, and although it ended up narrower than it started, it never managed to turn the election around. A factor that seems decisive is participation, which went from 52% to 68% this Sunday.
Brugada, 60, has dedicated half of his life to working for the largest Spanish-speaking city in the world. In local politics, she has been almost everything. She is a federal representative, local legislator, social attorney for the capital’s government, substitute senator and three-time mayor of Iztapalapa, the largest district in the capital. An economist by training, she forged her political career from the poorest neighborhoods, first as an activist and then as a civil servant. She walked hand in hand for years with leaders of the national left, such as López Obrador or former Foreign Minister Marcelo Ebrard, but she always defended her own ideas. An early feminist, Brugada is a figure close to the Mexican president and she was supported from the first moment by the hardest wing of the party.
The virtual head of government, a feminist who began her political career in social organizations and activism for the poor, does not only have the support of the president. From the first moment that Sheinbaum’s possible successors were considered in the capital, she was the favorite among his fellow soldiers. She had everything to be the best option, in the eyes of the hard wing of the party, those most purist and left-wing. Although the internal party marked a much higher voting preference for the capital’s former Secretary of Security Omar García Harfuch, the party chose to elevate her.
The Mexican capital, the second district with the most voters behind the State of Mexico, has always served as a political thermometer on the national stage. This Sunday’s elections have painted a favorable picture for the formation of López Obrador in Mexico City, where not only the president maintains a very positive image, but also Sheinbaum, former head of the city’s government. This electoral drag has had a significant impact in favor of the city’s campaign, where the party has also swept the presidential race, the Senate and the Congress of Deputies, with 27% of the votes counted.
The opposition has not managed to channel the discontent of a part of the population towards the Worker movement at the polls. Nor replicate the electoral success they had in 2021, the first time the PRI, PAN and PRD allied themselves. Taboada tried to focus his speech this time on the water crisis that the capital is going through and the insecurity, in the middle of a campaign with 37 murdered candidates. However, it has not been enough to convince voters, in part, because the capital managed to lower crime rates in the last Administration, with a wave of violence hitting the States. The former head of government, now president-elect, has promised to export that security model to the rest of the country. Brugada has also taken advantage of this supposed success, and has committed to maintaining the current way of working of the security forces.
Security and drought will be two of the biggest obstacles that the next head of Government will face. Although the capital is a box of constant surprises, which has always posed new challenges to whoever governed. Brugada, a specialist in urban planning, changed the skyline of Iztapalapa, the largest mayor’s office and one of the poorest, during her three administrations. She will now have six years to try in the city.
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