La Presidenta de Mexico

All the winning

Old news by now, but as expected Claudia Sheinbaum was elected President of Mexico on Sunday, garnering a decisive 60% of the vote, representing the largest number of votes won by a single candidate in Mexico’s history. This is an historic moment for Mexico, as Claudia Sheinbaum is both the first female and first Jewish president of this country. Sheinbaum won every state in Mexico except for Aguascalientes, which went to Xóchitl Gálvez. Moreover, Sheinbaum’s party - the Morena party - cruised to victory in both chambers of Mexico’s Congress, which will render much of Sheinbaum’s legislative plan an implementation detail.

An historic election

This last Sunday’s election is the largest in Mexico’s history - with nearly 20,000 seats in contest at the local, state and federal levels. This includes all 500 seats in the Chamber of Deputies (Mexico’s lower house of Congress) and all 128 seats in the Senate of the Republic (the upper house of Congress). This election was also Mexico’s most violent, with at least 37 candidates across the country having been assassinated during the campaign season.

Follow the money

With Mexico experiencing one of the most violent periods in recent history (violence in Mexico is predominantly cartel-related, gang-on-gang violence), one may wonder why the incumbent party (Morena) was able to command such a large victory. The answer is simple: Mexico’s economy has performed remarkably well under the current Morena administration of Andrés Manuel López Obrador. The peso has soared to unprecedented strength, and Mexico’s minimum wage has doubled during Obrador’s tenure as President. No, Mexico is not suddenly indistinguishable from Dubai - but for most voters, their economic circumstances have improved during the current administration.

Left or leftist?

U.S. news outlets such as The AP, The Los Angeles Times, and The New York Times seem to love to throw around the term “leftist” when talking about Sheinbaum, as though she is the ideological heir to Che Guevara. This is symptomatic of the traditional U.S. press’ simplistic and internally-oriented perspective when reporting on most news in Mexico. Which leads me to this recommendation: if you are interested in more nuanced, researched, and balanced reporting on the left-right spectrum in Mexico, check out The Mexico Political Economist’s excellent article on the subject here.

Looking forward

Sheinbaum will begin her single (presidents in Mexico are limited to one term) six-year term on October 1. It will be interesting to see what kind of presidential leader she becomes. While she lacks Obrador’s charisma, she is known to be a tough and demanding boss who holds people accountable. She is brilliant and highly results-oriented. But she is on a much larger stage now than she was as Mayor of Mexico City, where she gained these reputations. One hopes that she can break free of some of her predecessor’s more populist and anti-democratic tendencies, as well as his laissez-faire attitude toward organized crime. The track record of Mexico’s Presidents in recent memory has been sketchy at best, disastrous at worst. We’ll see what happens when testosterone is removed from the equation.

For more on Claudia Sheinbaum, see past Mexico Listo articles here, here, here, and here.