Mexico: Far Left Clinches Presidency in Historically Violent Election

Claudia Sheinbaum, the candidate for Mexico’s ruling leftist National Regeneration Movement (Morena) party, was overwhelmingly elected as the next President of Mexico in Sunday’s general election.

Sheinbaum, a 61-year-old politician, scientist, and academic, will become Mexico’s first woman president once she succeeds her mentor, outgoing far-left President Andrés Manuel López Obrador, at the start of her six-year term on October 1.

The new president-elect, who served as Head of Government of Mexico City between 2018-2023, has vowed to continue the leftist policies of López Obrador and the Morena party, founded by the outgoing president in 2018.

Over 45 million Mexicans headed to the polls in Sunday’s general election to choose a new president and members of Congress. According to preliminary results published by the Mexican National Electoral Institute (INE) at press time, the ruling Morena party and its allies, in addition to winning the presidency, are on track to obtain an overwhelming majority in Congress, which would allow them to reform the Mexican constitution.  

Sunday’s electoral event has been described as the most violent in Mexico’s democratic history. Local authorities reported that two shootings at voting centers in the central Mexican state of Puebla left two dead. In the state of Tlapanalá, a woman died in a confrontation between armed men allegedly seeking to steal ballots, while in the municipality of Coyomeapan a man died from a gunshot wound outside a polling place at a secondary school.

A total of 26 candidates were killed throughout the entire electoral process that culminated with Sunday’s elections, according to the Mexican government. The official number differs from that published by the local consulting agency Integralia, which claimed that at least 34 candidates were murdered before Sunday’s election took place. Integralia raised the tally to 231 homicides when factoring in officials or former officials, politicians or former politicians, family members, and collateral victims.

With 82 percent of the vote tallied by INE at press time, Sheinbaum – who represented the leftist alliance between Morena, the Labor Party (PT), and the Green Ecologist Party of Mexico (PVEM) – obtained 28.8 million votes, an overwhelming 58.8 percent of all votes cast. 

Her closest rival, main opposition candidate Xochitl Galvez, obtained 13.8 million votes, which amounted to 28.1 percent. Galvez ran in representation of Mexico’s traditional parties, the National Action Party (PAN), the Institutional Revolutionary Party (PRI), and the Party of the Democratic Revolution (PRD). The PRI ran Mexico for 71 years – from 1929 to 2000 – routinely crushing the PAN and PRD.

Jorge Álvarez of the center-left Citizens’ Movement party came in third place with 5.1 million votes, which translated to 10.5 percent of the votes cast. Voter turnout was tallied at 60.13 percent.

While the results from the legislative elections have not been finalized at press time, Morena and its allies are projected to secure anywhere between 346 and 380 out of the 500 seats in the Chamber of Deputies. In the Senate, Morena and its allies are projected to obtain between 76 to 88 of the Senate’s 128 seats.

A qualified majority of at least 334 members of the Chamber of Deputies and 85 in the Senate are required to pass significant changes to Mexican law, including potential reforms to its constitution. The ruling Morena party has expressed its intention to “shield” López Obrador’s leftist reforms by codifying them into the constitution through a reform. 

Sheinbaum addressed her supporters on Sunday evening shortly after the INE published its first preliminary results. In her message, she stressed that, for the first time, a woman will preside over the Mexican government and pledged to continue with the “fourth transformation,” a name given to the leftist policies promoted by López Obrador over the course of his six years as President.

“As I have said on other occasions, I am not alone. We are all here, with our heroines who gave us our homeland, with our ancestors, our mothers, our daughters and our granddaughters,” Sheinbaum said.

“I want to thank millions of Mexicans who decided to vote for us on this historic day. I am also grateful because for the first time in 200 years of the Republic I will become the first woman president of Mexico,” she continued.

The Mexican president-elect said that the election’s results, in which she obtained an overwhelming victory, are the result of the “recognition of the people of Mexico to our history, to the results, to the conviction and will, but above all it is the recognition of the people of Mexico to our project of nation.”

“We demonstrated that Mexico is a democratic country,” she asserted.

Outgoing Mexican President López Obrador announced during a Monday morning press conference that he had spoken to Sheinbaum following Sunday’s results.

López Obrador praised Sunday’s election for having concluded with the victory of the most voted woman in the history of Mexico and praised Sheinbaum as a very intelligent woman, “both for her sensitivity and her academic degrees.”

“I congratulated her, I am very happy because imagine what it means to hand over the presidency to a woman after 200 years of Mexico being governed only by men,” the outgoing president said.

The outgoing president said that he will seek to meet with her as soon as she is able to and expressed the possibility of the two traveling together in the near future.

“We are going to be together and we are going to talk a lot. She is very knowledgeable and also, as I said, she is very intelligent,” López Obrador said. “She knows very well, for example, because she has been traveling all over the country, she made an intense campaign, she visited many towns, she was in the public squares and she was picking up the feelings of the people.”

Xóchitl Gálvez, who came in second place, announced on Sunday that she had called Sheinbaum to acknowledge her defeat.

“I told her that I saw a Mexico with a lot of pain and violence and wish that she could solve the serious problems of our people, I recognized the result because I love Mexico, because I know that if her government does well so will our country,” Gálvez told her supporters, assuring them that she would continue to be an activist.

Sheinbaum has received congratulations from several leaders of leftist governments and authoritarian regimes in Latin America, such as Venezuela’s socialist dictator Nicolás Maduro, the Cuban communist Castro regime’s figurehead President Miguel Díaz-Canel, and Colombia’s far-left President Gustavo Petro.

Bolivia’s former socialist president and wannabe dictator Evo Morales published a video on social media late Sunday evening that showed him and Argentina’s socialist former President Alberto Fernández personally meeting with Sheinbaum, and congratulating her over her electoral victory. 

Morales, in the social media post, thanked outgoing President López Obrador for being the “moral reserve of humanity.” López Obrador had offered Morales a safe haven when he attempted to usurp power in a fraudulent election in Bolivia in 2019.

Former Argentine President Fernández also shared a video of the encounter on social media. 

“I have had the privilege of being able to embrace the new president of this beloved country, our dear Claudia Sheinbaum,” Fernández’s message read. “I had the honor of being with her and her team receiving the first results.”

“A progressive woman will continue in Mexico the enormous task started by my dear  López Obrador,” the message continued. “Latin America celebrates. Congratulations, dear Claudia.”

Christian K. Caruzo is a Venezuelan writer and documents life under socialism. You can follow him on Twitter here.