Claudia Sheinbaum of the Morena party has been elected the new president of Mexico, according to the official preliminary results.
The National Electoral Institute (INE) is steadily updating the presidential, parliamentary, state, and local results for Mexico's June 2 election.
At the time of writing, with more than 10% of the votes counted, Sheinbaum has won 58% of the vote and her rival Xochitl Gálvez 30%. Nationally, Morena on its own received just 45%, followed by the National Action Party (PAN) with 16% and the Institutional Revolutionary Party (PRI) with 11%. Morena appears set to win 41% of the Senate and Chamber of Deputies.
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Mexico's largest elections yet
More than 170,000 voting booths were meant to be available today, with most of them opening late and people waiting up to five hours to vote. All the booths I observed in Puebla city opened 1.5 hours late. The country is still going through a heat wave, and people had to queue up in temperatures of 35–40°C in many cities and regions.
By 1.40pm, the INE announced that 97.6% of booths had opened. Aside from the president, 20,000 local, state and parliamentary positions were also being elected.
While almost 100 million people are eligible to vote, participation rates have typically been around 63% for the past two decades. This time however, the turnout has been lower, at just 58%.
Voting was peaceful in most of the country, but there was a shooting at a booth in Coyomeapan, in Puebla state. One person was killed, another injured and the booth had to close. Another person was killed in Puebla state while organised criminals stole ballot boxes.
In the campaign leading up to polling day, 37 candidates were killed. Such violence is a result of corruption and of organised crime groups trying to assert control over a region, in order to protect their trade, industries and trafficking routes.
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Two coalitions
Sheinbaum was previously head of government of Mexico City. She and current president Andrés Manuel López Obrador (AMLO) have made it clear she will be continuing Morena's project and all its policies. She ran for the coalition Sigamos Haciendo Historia ("Let's Keep Making History") made up of Morena, the Ecologist Green Party (PVEM) and the Workers Party (PT). Despite its name, the PVEM is a conservative party that has previously aligned with the PRI and PAN in past elections and some of their members have been accused of being paramilitaries and of attacking teachers and communal land owners.
Morena was created in 2011 by AMLO as part of his presidential campaign for 2012. Although the party includes a few activists and sometimes upholds an anti-neoliberal discourse focused on social wellbeing, it is also filled with opportunistic politicians who have switched over from right-wing parties. Over the past six years, Morena's governance at national, state, and local levels has shown that, despite its rhetoric, its policies and actions are rarely different to those of right-wing parties.
The main presidential challenger was Xochitl Gálvez, a businessperson running for a right-wing coalition of the PAN and PRI (which together governed Mexico for the past century, until Morena won the last election) and the Party of the Democratic Revolution (PRD).
Gálvez talked a lot about fear and security during her campaign, hinting at sharing the Ecuadorian and Salvadoran governments' approaches to organised crime. In those two countries, an army-led crackdown involving mass arrests of alleged members of gangs and often also of innocent people, has been popular among residents who are sick of the daily stress of gang taxes, crime, kidnappings, murders and corruption, and don't see any effective alternative.
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In 2018, AMLO won 53% of the vote, the PAN candidate 22%, and the PRI 16%. Sheinbaum has received a higher vote as a candidate representing three parties, but Morena's vote has dropped. This may encourage Morena to lean in to Gálvez's messaging and to continue Morena's military-led approach to dealing with crime and criminalising the huge number of migrants moving through Mexico to the United States.
On the other hand, given Morena's huge lead over other parties, Sheinbaum may feel there is space to be a little less timid than her predecessor about implementing policies that rock the boat. Alternatively, given how little Morena has been punished for its pro-corporate policies, she could decide to maintain that rhythm.
It is insignificant for Mexican women and nonbinary people that the country will now have a female president. Niether Sheinbaum — nor her rival Gálvez — have a record of consistent actions that support women and the huge feminist movement and marches here (millions have been marching on March 8 alone).
As head of Mexico City, Sheinbaum has only expressed cautious solidarity with the marches and has done nothing beyond metro advertising campaigns to address the huge impunity rates for rape and femicide. Her government even repressed women's movements by sending police to arrest and imprison activists who had taken over the National Human Rights Commission. Under the Morena government, following sustained and intense pressure from the movements, the Supreme Court ruled that abortion was legal. However, many Morena politicans were against it.
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Disillusion with elections and voting for forcibly disappeared people
Morena has a relatively strong but passive support base and hired thousands of youth to do its election campaigning. Most social movements — particularly those fighting for Indigenous rights, land rights, migrant rights, the environment, women's rights, water, justice for murdered journalists and for the forcibly disappeared — do not support any of the political parties.
The low participation rate today speaks to the apathy and frustration of many Mexicans, but also to the strength of the movements and some unions, who refused to vote. Activists are clear that the corruption or "trafficking of influence" where public positions are sold to the highest bidder, the role of organised crime, the strong ties between all parties and corporations, and the fact that the parties never listen to movements, mean that voting is a waste of time.
One activist at a recent protest camp — to demand justice for 43 Ayotzinapa student teachers who disappeared and were likely murdered almost 10 years ago — told me he wouldn't be voting in the election. He witnessed the1968 Tlatelolco student massacre, where the army killed about 500 people and beat and arrested more than a thousand more.
"No one has ever been punished, because it was the state and the army who did it. Fifty-six years without justice. I won't vote because elections are just a game for who can win the different positions," he said.
There are 116,000 disappeared people in Mexico — most likely kidnapped, murdered, or trafficked. In most cases, the state has never bothered to look for them.
Movements of families of the disappeared are frustrated with the lack of governmental and institutional support and ran a campaign encouraging people to vote for a disappeared person instead of a politician. Thousands took up the call, writing names in the box for non-registered candidates. Many people shared their ballots on social media.
Other communities decided to prohibit voting booths altogether. In Santa Maria Chimalapa, Oaxaca state, residents decided "not to defend politicians" and to mobilise to defend the forest instead, as there are currently large bushfires there.
In Chiapas the CNTE, the education union, burnt electoral campaign material and attacked the state congress building with molotov cocktails, on June 1, writing on the walls, "No to the electoral circus" and "No to the electoral farce". A CNTE leader speaking about the protest, encouraged citizens to boycott the elections, which he described as a "manipulated process". The CNTE has been protesting for weeks to demand wage increases.
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The election games: Who gets to sell Mexico
Over the past six years, while Morena has demonstrated a light commitment to meagre social welfare benefits for retirees (now AU$532 every two months) and for students, its policies have not confronted the causes of poverty and inequality, such as the unlimited reign of national and transnational corporations.
Instead, like the right-wing governments before it, Morena — at national and local levels — has facilitated the looting of the country at the expense of Indigenous communities, the environment, sovereignty or autonomy, and extreme exploitation of workers. Large portions of Indigenous land and natural areas have been handed over to the real estate industry, and the government spent US$4 billion building a second airport for Mexico City, with Latin America's now largest industrial town next door. The town is home to companies like DHL that facilitate trade with the US.
European companies and the tourism industry — rather than the environment — will benefit from the Morena government's Maya train development. In Puebla state, the national government has built a military industrial park to manufacture weapons.
However, there aren't enough resources to address the serious and core issues the country is facing, such as water shortages, caused in a large part by industries and corporations consuming huge amounts of water, or that the majority of workers are informal and have no rights, or that there is a dire lack of basic healthcare infrastructure and human rights guarantees.
The new government will be no different. Sheinbaum has promised to build 100 more industrial parks and to prioritise facilitating foreign investment and infrastructure (mostly roads). AMLO had also boasted about his strong promotion of nearshoring.
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Impact on the Latin American left
While the two coalitions have similar approaches to migrants, big business and human rights, they do differ in their international discourse. Morena has verbally supported and defended the left, and left-leaning governments in Latin America, while Gálvez said she wouldn't have any relationship with Cuba, Venezuela, or Nicaragua. AMLO has so far refused to meet with far-right Argentinian president, Javier Milei.
Sheinbaum will continue Morena's foreign policy discourse, but she is unlikely to defend other countries nor Mexico in any way that significantly upsets the US. On migration, she has mimicked US Vice President Kamala Harris' approach, arguing that foreign investment would prevent migrants from needing to migrate.
Ultimately, the strength of the left in Latin America can't rest on empty discourse. Withstanding US economic and policy pressures, as well as attacks like sanctions and media campaigns, involves more genuine pro-people and environmental policies, and actually listening to movements and communities. Sheinbaum has demonstrated that, though she may implement a few sustainable projects led by corporations, she will not be doing that.
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