Mexico set for first female president
MEXICANS were to vote in national elections yesterday with the ruling party candidate, Claudia Sheinbaum, commanding a hefty lead in the polls and expected to become the country’s first female president.
Sheinbaum’s mentor and popular outgoing president, Andres Manuel Lopez Obrador, has loomed over the campaign, seeking to turn the vote into a referendum on his political project that Sheinbaum, a leftist, has vowed to continue.
“We already won the campaign, we already won the debates and now we have to win the election to consolidate the continuity of the national project,” said Sheinbaum, 61, a trained physicist and former Mexico City mayor.
Yesterday;s elections are the biggest in Mexico’s history, with voters electing about 20 000 posts.
The contest has been marred by violence with 37 candidates murdered during the campaign, the most in the country’s modern history, stoking concerns about the threat of warring drug cartels to Mexico’s democracy.
Polls have placed Sheinbaum about 20 percentage points ahead of her closest challenger, Xochitl Galvez, a businesswoman and senator who heads an opposition coalition comprised of the Institutional Revolutionary Party (PRI), which ruled Mexico for about seven decades until democratic elections in 2000, the right-wing PAN, and the leftist PRD party.
Either women’s victory will be heralded as a major step in Mexico, becoming the first female leader in a country often criticised for its macho culture. The winner will face formidable challenges, especially how to tame organised crime violence that contributed to more than 185 000 people being murdered since Lopez Obrador took office in December 2018.
That violence, along with electricity and water shortages, is a problem as Mexico attempts to persuade manufacturers to relocate as part of the near-shoring trend, in which companies move supply chains closer to their main markets.
The winner will also have to wrestle with what to do with Pemex, the state oil giant which has seen production decline for two decades and is drowning in debt.
Both candidates have promised to expand welfare programmes, which could be a challenge amid a large deficit this year and sluggish GDP growth of just 1.5% expected next year.
Sheinbaum has rejected opposition claims that she would be a “puppet” of Lopez Obrador though she has pledged to continue many of his policies. The new president will also face tense negotiations with the US over the huge flows of Us-bound migrants crossing Mexico and security co-operation over drug trafficking at a time the US fentanyl epidemic rages.