Mexico: Mexico is likely to elect the country’s first woman president as the ruling Morena party and the opposition coalition chose female candidates in the 2024 election. The Morena Party has confirmed former Mexico City mayor Ms. Claudia Sheinbaum as its candidate in the presidential election.
Ms. Sheinbaum is a climate scientist-turned-politician who was widely believed to be the preferred choice of President Mr. Andrés Manuel López Obrador, who is unable to run again. The former mayor has presented herself as a continuity candidate and stands to benefit from Mr. López Obrador’s enduring popularity as well as the support of the state apparatus during the election campaign.
According to reports, Morena had calculated an assured victory in the June 2024 elections, but the dramatic emergence of senator Ms. Xóchitl Gálvez as the opposition candidate has overturned expectations.
Ms. Gálvez, a businesswoman who became a senator in 2018, became the candidate of a broad opposition coalition that includes the PAN, PRI, and PRD, the country’s three oldest mainstream parties. Both Ms. Sheinbaum and Ms. Gálvez were chosen through a series of polls aimed at ensuring greater transparency and public participation than in the past, when presidents used to choose their successors.
The opposition coalition never conducted the final consultation of the process it set out because another candidate, Ms. Beatriz Paredes, withdrew, thus handing the nomination to the frontrunner, Ms. Gálvez.
Meanwhile, Mr. Marcelo Ebrard, Morena’s runner-up, has accused the party of favouritism towards Sheinbaum. Mr. Ebrard declared his team had found anomalies in 14 percent of the ballots cast in the national poll Morena conducted to decide the candidate’s candidature.
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