Change, of a sort, in Mexico

Mexico went to the polls on 2 June, the day after the end of the Indian election. It too has a bad electoral system: the presidency is elected for a six-year term in a single first-past-the-post nationwide ballot. For three successive elections, from 2000 to 2012, presidents were elected with less than 45% of the vote.

But in 2018 the system didn’t matter. Leftist Andrés Manuel López Obrador won with a big majority, taking 54.7% of the vote even though he was opposed by all three of the country’s traditional main parties: the National Action Party (PAN; centre-right), whose candidate had 22.9%, the Institutional Revolutionary Party (PRI; vaguely centre-left establishment) with 16.9%, and the Party of the Democratic Revolution (PRD; left-wing), which didn’t field its own candidate but was supporting PAN. An independent, Jaime Rodríguez Calderón, took the remaining 5.4%.

So Mexico’s voters had obviously decided, not without good cause, that politics-as-usual was not working and that it was time to shake up the system. In office, however, López Obrador has not been particularly radical – he has leant towards a sort of left-wing Trumpism, but his autocratic tendencies have been no worse than those of many of his predecessors. Mid-term congressional elections in 2021 gave him a qualified endorsement, with his party, Morena, and its allies winning a reduced majority.

In a system that concentrates power in the presidency, there is one very important limitation: the president can only serve a single term, so López Obrador will leave office in six months time. (He has promised to leave politics completely, the sort of promise that is not always kept.) To replace him, Morena nominated Claudia Sheinbaum, the mayor of Mexico City. The three traditional parties rallied behind a single candidate – also a woman, PAN’s Xóchitl Gálvez – while the centre-left Citizens’ Movement was represented by Jorge Máynez.

But the result was never in doubt. Sheinbaum maintained a big lead in the polls throughout the campaign, averaging more than twenty points, and on the day she did even better, taking 61.2% of the vote against 28.1% for Gálvez and 10.6% for Máynez, a margin of almost twenty million votes. Turnout was 61.0%, down a couple of points on 2018 but in line with recent experience. (See official results here.)

Sheinbaum will therefore become Mexico’s first female president, as well as the first of Jewish descent. It’s not clear how much difference that will make to the country’s often corrupt and patriarchal politics, but there’s no doubt that she has an impressive mandate. The Morena-led coalition also won a big majority in the legislature, with 373 of the 500 seats in the Chamber of Deputies and 83 of the 128 seats in the Senate.

The election completed the devastation of the old party system. The PRD (where López Obrador started out) has been almost wiped out, finishing with just one member of the lower house and two senators. PAN has consolidated its position as the main opposition party, but it has a big task ahead to recover ground. The PRI, which once held unchallenged sway, is now jostling with Citizens’ Movement for third place. But what is gained quickly can be lost quickly as well, and Mexican voters have shown that no establishment is safe.

There’s been plenty of activity elsewhere in Latin America as well, especially with the tussle over president Javier Milei’s reform agenda in Argentina. But we’ll come back to that another time: next week, we’ll look at some of the momentous electoral news from Europe.